Computational linguistics is 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.

Purposes

There are two major purposes of computational linguistics:

1. To help linguists study natural languages more easily
2. To make it possible for ordinary people to use natural language when using a computer

Computational linguists often use large bodies of digitized text or speech called corpora as a basis for teaching computer programs the proper use of a language, or to compare the use of a language in one context to its use in another context. This is also called corpus linguistics.

Some of the practical uses of computational linguistics include:

• Speech recognition
• Speech production
• Machine translation
• Improvements to data mining, including search engine design.

History

See also: ELIZA.

See Also: Wikipedia:computational linguistics