I have asked on area51 whether Linguistics would include natural language processing, the most voted answer being for a merge of the proposals.
Is it taken into account? How would the merge be done? Until it is done or NLP is on beta is it OK to ask NLP-related questions here?
Having done academic and some professional work in both linguistics and NLP, I would be inclined to say that the two do not have much overlap in expertise or application.
That being said, that link is no more tenuous than that between syntacticians and phoneticians, and I think it's about time to two broad classes of NLP and linguistics welcomed each other as first-class citizens.
The tag structure on StackOverflow works exceptionally well in ensuring that you see content that is relevant to you while still getting a taste of what others in the community have to offer. This would give people ample opportunity to ignore NLP questions. I say bring it on!
Since the NLP is just a proposal for now with no guarantee it will make it to a full blown site I think it's a good idea to allow NLP questions here that deal with the linguistic aspect rather than the programming aspect.
When NLP comes to life as I hope it will we can migrate those questions. This way we don't have to base our content on speculations about the future.
For NLP questions from the programming aspect they belong on Stack Overflow for now and again SO may like to migrate such questions to an NLP site that becomes successful too.
