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> it seems to me that computer science, just over the relatively short time I've been paying attention, is becoming more-and-more abstract in a lot of ways.

But can we still call it computer science? It seems to me more like linguistics / mathematics / statistics, with the CS only to do the low-level computations and accounting of data.

Of course, if you build a global-scale efficient search engine with it, the role of CS may become bigger.

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As a computer scientist I think we benefit as a group from having NLP fit under computer science, so yes I think we should call it computer science. The overarching question is: why does it matter what we classify NLP as?

I think it matters because it determines what kind of people you would hire to do the R&D.

NLP is a domain specific problem. Of course it shouldn't be under computer science. Pure computer scientists are much less useful than linguists for these things. That's like arguing that building physics simulations is under the realm of computer science. You'd want your team to be mostly linguists, some which specialize in computational linguistics. A vanilla computer scientist, to be frank, is almost useless, especially at the PhD level.

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