PRESENTATION OUTLINE
Computational Linguistics
Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective.
Traditionally, computational linguistics was usually performed by computer scientists who had specialized in the application of computers to the processing of a natural language.
Computational linguistics has theoretical and applied components, where theoretical computational linguistics takes up issues in theoretical linguistics and cognitive science, and applied computational linguistics focuses on the practical outcome of modeling human language use.
Computational linguistics originated with efforts in the United States in the 1950s to use computers to automatically translate texts from foreign languages, particularly Russian scientific journals, into English.Since computers can make arithmetic calculations much faster and more accurately than humans, it was thought to be only a short matter of 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 to yield accurate translations right away, automated processing of human languages 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.
Nowadays research within the scope of computational linguistics is done at computational linguistics departments, computational linguistics laboratories, computer science departments and linguistics departments. Some research in the field of computational linguistics aim to create working speech or text processing systems while others aim to create a system allowing human-machine interaction. Programs meant for human-machine communication are called conversational agents.
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 (recognition) or synthesizing 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. The possibility of automatic language translation, however, has yet to be realized and remains a notorious branch of computational linguistics.
Some of the areas of research that are studied by computational linguistics include:
- Computational complexity of natural language, largely modeled on automata theory, with the application of context-sensitive grammar and linearly bounded Turing machines.
- Computational semantics comprises defining suitable logics for linguistic meaning representation, automatically constructing them and reasoning with them
- Computer-aided corpus linguistics, which has been used since the 1970s as a way to make detailed advances in the field of discourse analysis
- Design of parsers or chunkers for natural languages
- Design of taggers like POS-taggers (part-of-speech taggers)
- Machine translation as one of the earliest and most difficult applications of computational linguistics draws on many subfields.
- Simulation and study of language evolution in historical linguistics/glottochronology.
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.
