I wrote this article for Communications of the ACM. It was published on 15 September 2026
Barbara Plank started out as a computer scientist, with no particular ambition to study language. That changed when she took a course in computational linguistics. She became fascinated by how different language was from most problems she had encountered in computer science. There is rarely a single correct way to express a thought; language is full of variation. “For me, it is a living organism that’s deeply connected to humans,” Plank says. “We express ourselves in it, we store knowledge in it, we use it to communicate. Language is constantly changing and it’s hard to capture. That fascinates me.”
That fascination with something so difficult to pin down precisely led her to specialize in computational linguistics, or natural language processing – two terms that, for Plank, describe essentially the same object of study. Plank, Professor of AI and Computational Linguistics at LMU Munich in Germany, gave an invited talk entitled “The Myth of the Ground Truth: What Human Disagreement Teaches Us About AI” at IJCAI-ECAI 2026 in Bremen in August. After her lecture, we sat down for an interview.
Barbara Plank started out as a computer scientist, with no particular ambition to study language. That changed when she took a course in computational linguistics. She became fascinated by how different language was from most problems she had encountered in computer science. There is rarely a single correct way to express a thought; language is full of variation. “For me, it is a living organism that’s deeply connected to humans,” Plank says. “We express ourselves in it, we store knowledge in it, we use it to communicate. Language is constantly changing and it’s hard to capture. That fascinates me.”
That fascination with something so difficult to pin down precisely led her to specialize in computational linguistics, or natural language processing – two terms that, for Plank, describe essentially the same object of study. Plank, Professor of AI and Computational Linguistics at LMU Munich in Germany, gave an invited talk entitled “The Myth of the Ground Truth: What Human Disagreement Teaches Us About AI” at IJCAI-ECAI 2026 in Bremen in August. After her lecture, we sat down for an interview.
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