Several important tendencies have been emerging recently in the NLP community. First of all, work on corpora tends to become the norm, which constitutes a fruitful convergence area between taskdriven, computational approaches and descriptive linguistic ones. On corpora validation becomes more and more important for theoretical models, and the accuracy of these models can be evaluated either with regard to their ability to account for the reality of a given corpus (pursuing descriptive aims), either with regard to their ability to analyse it accurately (pursuing operational aims). .
