computational linguistics

The application and development of statistical and computational techniques as part of the study of language. Areas of interest include analysing the frequency of occurrence of particular words to investigate the authorship of a text, the use of computers in speech analysis and synthesis, the study of techniques of automatic (‘machine’) translation, and the development of computational models of linguistic structure and interaction as part of research into artificial intelligence.

Linguistics

Theoretical linguistics

Phonetics

Phonology

Morphology

Syntax

Semantics

Lexical semantics

Statistical semantics

Structural semantics

Prototype semantics

Stylistics

Prescription

Pragmatics

Applied linguistics

Psycholinguistics

Sociolinguistics

Generative linguistics

Cognitive linguistics

Computational linguistics

Descriptive linguistics

Historical linguistics

Comparative linguistics

Etymology

History of linguistics

List of linguists

Unsolved problems

Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical and logical modeling of natural language from a computational perspective. 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. 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.

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.

The Association for Computational Linguistics defines computational linguistics as:

...the scientific study of language from a computational perspective.