Letter from the Editor-in-Chief

Abstract

Dear colleagues, our authors and readers!

The theme of this issue of the journal – Computer Technologies in the Service of Linguistics – has brought together young authors who have their own experience of using computer technologies in linguistic research and experience of theoretical understanding of this problem, the fundamental nature of which for modern linguistics is beyond doubt.

In the first section, there are papers by colleagues from Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University — Computer Technologies in Linguistics by Vadim A. Belov and the joint work of Alexander V. Dmitrijev and Elena S. Krupnova Comparative-Contrastive Analysis of Linguistic Resources for Corpus Analysis of Texts. Although, judging by the titles, the main objects of analysis are technologies, in fact, the authors are interested in the range of research problems, to the solution of which computer technologies and special linguistic resources are applied. The analysis of publications, both domestic and foreign, presented in these papers, convinces us that linguistics has already achieved significant results with the help of computer technologies and even more promising prospects are opening up. The importance of the concord of linguistics and computer technologies is so great that special linguistics fields are being discussed, including computer and corpus linguistics, which, of course, can be argued, but does not exclude the persuasiveness of all the facts and considerations presented.

The second section Poetry Language Through Database Lens confirms the persuasiveness of the theoretical judgments expressed, where the paper by Associate Professor of Petrozavodsk State University Aleksandr A. Lebedev Advantages of Using Databases in Linguistic Research is presented. Without denying the classical methods of studying the language of poetry separated from us by three centuries, the author studies database technology, adding tables, statistical data and new aspects of texts that are revealed to the researcher armed with the latest technologies.

The third section of the issue Artificial Intelligence features papers by our young authors — post-graduate students and research fellows of Yaroslav-the-Wise Novgorod State University. Until recently, artificial intelligence seemed to be a matter of the uncertain future, but today, as the papers convince us, it is already a fact of our everyday life — educational and scientific. It is interesting that both papers are based on experiments.

Liubov G. Alexeeva and Peter S. Alexeev (by the way, newly married couple, with which we congratulate them) have organized a pedagogical experiment, asking their students to formulate a request for a neural network, and analyze the results, ultimately formulating the principles of the language of such requests. Their paper is called Prompt Language, or Features of Queries to Generative Neural Networks for Image Creation, which convinces us: we are probably going to have to master this language quite soon, and this is the interest in the paper and its practical value.

Alexey S. Savelyev in his paper Human and Computer in Scientific Text offers the results of a series of experiments he has conducted, changing real scientific texts and even writing absurd scientific texts. All this in order to show how a neural network “evaluates” scientific texts. Analyzing different aspects of modern and classical scientific texts, the author shows what a neural network accepts as scientific and how often these features are far from the real scientific value and originality of the text. In terms of evaluation, this paper brings a note of sobriety and even skepticism to the attitude towards computer technologies and their reliability in evaluating scientific articles.

Thus, the papers of this issue present the problem of the relationship between linguistics and computer technologies, both frontally with great hopes and specifically with an understanding of the complexities and even dangers of this unification.

It is worth mentioning that the geography of the issue corresponds to the title of the journal: all the authors work in the North-West, and, along with linguists from Veliky Novgorod and Petrozavodsk, the journal publishes researchers from St. Petersburg. It should be noted that representatives of the classical universities have met on the pages of the issue with employees of the famous Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, which includes the Higher School of Linguistics and Pedagogy.

I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the authors of the issue and reviewers — Doctors of Philological Sciences Vladimir I. Zaika from Veliky Novgorod, Vadim A. Belov from St. Petersburg.

Until we meet again on the electronic pages of our journal!

T. V. Shmeleva