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What is Computational Linguistics?
Computational Linguistics (CL) is a relatively recent field within linguistics, that can be crudely defined as "the study of processing natural language with computers".
According to Grishman, the aim of CL is to give computer systems the ability to generate and interpret natural language. "This would make it possible for computers to perform linguistic tasks (such as translation), process textual data (books, journals, newspapers), and make it much easier for people to access computer-stored data" (Grishman 1986).
Research involving CL began in the 1950's with Machine Translation, and most growth in the field has only occurred in the last 40 years. Specifically, the "rise of the Web", over the past decade, has greatly influenced development of the two areas of "language-based information retrieval and information extraction" (Jurafsky and Martin 2000).
Current practical applications of computational linguistics techniques and algorithms include: "spelling checking, text document search, speech recognition, Web-page processing, part-of-speech tagging, machine translation, and spoken-language dialogue agents" (Jurafsky and Martin 2000).
Other areas of study within the purview of CL include the subjects covered in greater detail on this site, as well as Speech Synthesis, Coreference, Question-Answering, Word-sense Disambiguation, and Multilingual Processing. Multilingual processing refers to those systems performing tasks other than translation, using languages other than English. One example is the Multilingual Entity Task (MET), performed along with the MUC Information Extraction evaluations. The MET-1 and MET-2 evaluations involved Information Extraction (of Named Entities) from Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese (TIPSTER MET 2000).

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Major research areas within Computational Linguistics

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This page last modified November 13, 2006 by Erica Brown.
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