Computational linguistics

Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modeling of natural language and the processing of linguistic information. Key focus areas:

Development of computer systems that understand, interpret, and generate human language
Statistical and algorithmic methods for speech recognition, translation, text analysis
Study of appropriate knowledge representations for natural language
Research on how algorithms can learn language through machine learning
Evaluation and testing of natural language applications

Sub-fields look at syntax, semantics, pragmatics, phonetics, and morphology. Methods draw from computer science, artificial intelligence, linguistics, mathematics, and psychology.

Applications include machine translation, question answering, speech recognition, text summarization, and human-computer interaction.

Computational linguistics provides crucial infrastructure for the information age and the use of human language by computers. Challenges involve scale, ambiguity, and context-dependence in language.