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Computational linguistics
is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical and logical
modeling of natural language from a computational perspective. This
modeling is not limited to any particular field of linguistics.
Computational linguistics was formerly usually done by computer scientists
who had specialized in the application of computers to the processing
of a natural language. Recent research has shown that language is
much more complex than previously thought, so computational linguistics
work teams are now sometimes interdisciplinary, including linguists
(specifically trained in linguistics). Computational linguistics draws
upon the involvement of linguists, computer scientists, experts in
artificial intelligence, cognitive psychologists and logicians, amongst
others.
Origins
Computational
linguistics as a field predates artificial intelligence, a field under
which it is often grouped. Computational linguistics originated with
efforts in the United States in the 1950s to have computers
automatically translate texts in foreign languages into English,
particularly Russian scientific journals. Since
computers had proven their ability to do arithmetics much faster and
more accurately than humans, it was thought to be only a matter
of a short time before the technical details could be taken care of that
would allow them the same remarkable capacity to process language.
When machine translation (also
known as mechanical translation) failed immediately to yield accurate
translations, the problem was recognized as far more complex than had
originally been assumed. Computational linguistics was born as the name
of the new field of study devoted to developing algorithms and software
for intelligently processing language data. When artificial intelligence
came into existence in the 1960s, the field of computational
linguistics became that sub-division of artificial intelligence dealing
with human-level comprehension and production of natural languages.
In order to translate one language into another, it was observed that one had to understand the syntax of both languages, and at least at the level of morphology (the syntax of words) and whole sentences.
In order to understand syntax, one had to also understand the semantics
of the vocabulary, and even to understand something of the pragmatics
of how the language was being used. Thus, what started as an effort to
translate between languages evolved into an entire discipline devoted to
understanding how to represent and process individual natural languages
using computers.
Subfields
Computational
linguistics can be divided into major areas depending upon the medium
of the language being processed, whether spoken or textual; and upon the
task being performed, whether analyzing language (parsing) or creating
language (generation).
Speech recognition and speech synthesis deal with how spoken language can be understood or created using computers. Parsing
and generation are sub-divisions of computational linguistics dealing
respectively with taking language apart and putting it together.
Machine translation remains the sub-division of computational
linguistics dealing with having computers translate between languages.
Some of the areas of research that are studied by computational linguistics include:
Computer aided corpus linguistics
Design of parsers for natural languages
Design of taggers like POS-taggers (part-of-speech taggers)
Definition of specialized logics like resource logics for NLP
Research in the relation between formal and natural languages in general
Machine Translation, e.g. by a translating computer
The Association for Computational Linguistics defines computational linguistics as:
...the scientific study of
language from a computational perspective. Computational linguists are
interested in providing computational models of various kinds of
linguistic phenomena.