Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective.
Traditionally, computational linguistics was usually performed by computer scientistswho had specialized in the application of computers to the processing of a natural language. Computational linguists often work as members of interdisciplinary teams, including linguists (specifically trained in linguistics), language experts (persons with some level of ability in the languages relevant to a given project), and computer scientists. In general, computational linguistics draws upon the involvement oflinguists, computer scientists, experts in artificial intelligence, mathematicians,logicians, philosophers, cognitive scientists, cognitive psychologists, psycholinguists,anthropologists and neuroscientists, among others.
Computational linguistics has applied and theoretical components, where theoretical computational linguistics takes up issues in theoretical linguistics and cognitive science and applied computational linguistics focuses on the practical outcome of modelling human language use.[1]
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[edit]Origins
Computational linguistics as a field predates artificial intelligence, a field under which it is often grouped. 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.[2] Since computers can makearithmetic 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.[3]
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 developingalgorithms 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.[citation needed]
