A New Balancing Act: Reflections Computational Linguistics and AI

This talk originated as the opening keynote at this year's Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) meeting, the top conference in NLP. It was designed as a call to action for the NLP community, but much of what I had to say is applicable to AI and even the CS research community more broadly.
Beginning in the mid-1980s, a "statistical revolution" in NLP redefined what it meant to work on language from a computational perspective. Steve Abney, in his essay opening The Balancing Act: Combining Symbolic and Statistical Approaches to Language (Klavans and Resnik, eds., MIT Press, 1996), wrote: "In the space of the last ten years, statistical methods have gone from being virtually unknown in computational linguistics to being a fundamental given". We are again caught up in revolutionary times. Except this time around, the revolution is hurtling forward even faster, and it is redefining not only the research we do, but what it means to do research in the first place, the role of research in society, and society itself. What does this mean for people who do computational work with language -- what defines us as a community, what is our role, and where do we go from here?