Computational linguists are interested in providing computational models of various kinds of linguistic phenomena. These models may be "knowledge-based" ("hand-crafted") or "data-driven" ("statistical" or "empirical").
The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) was founded in 1924 to advance the scientific study of language and its applications. LSA plays a critical role in supporting and disseminating linguistic scholarship to professional linguists and to the general public.
The purpose of the Association for Linguistic Typology (ALT), founded in March 1994, is to advance the scientific study of typology, that is, of cross-linguistic diversity and the patterns underlying it.