In defence of a linguistic-aware approach to natural language processing

Although natural language processing can be deemed as a discipline between applied linguistics and artificial intelligence, theoretical linguistics has played a remarkably minor role in this field of research. One of the goals of this paper is to portray the reasons of the failed symbiosis between linguists' research and that of computer scientists, where probabilistic approaches haven been steadily overshadowing linguistic models. In spite of this discouraging scenario, FunGramKB, a knowledge base particularly designed for natural language understanding systems, serves to illustrate how a language-aware and cognitively-plausible approach to human-like processing can contribute to the development of enhanced knowledge-engineering projects.