Computational Linguistics
Computational linguistics is the study of computer systems for understanding and generating natural language.
Although the objectives of research in computational linguistics are widely varied, a primary motivation has always been the development of specific practical systems, which involve natural language. Three classes of applications which have been central in the development of computational linguistics are: machine translation, information retrieval, man-machine interfaces.
Computational linguistics may be defined as an application of computer science to modeling natural language communication as a software system. This includes a linguistic analysis of natural language using computers. Given that the natural languages are based on social conventions, computational linguistics is located at the historical divide between the natural sciences and mathematics, on the one hand, and the humanities and social sciences, on the other. In the beginnings of computer science in the 1940s, this divide opened as the distinction between numerical and non-numerical computation.
Computational linguistics seeks to describe methods for natural language processing, that is, for processing human languages by automatic means. Since the advent of electronic computers in the late 1940s, human language processing has been an area of active research: machine translation in particular attracted early interest. Indeed, the inspiration for computing machines was the creation of a thinking automaton, a machina sapiens, and language is perhaps the most distinctively human cognitive capacity. In computational linguistics the presumption of the sufficiency of grammatical and logical constraints, supplemented perhaps by ad hoc heuristics, was much more tenacious.
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