Linguistics/Computational Linguistics

Computational linguistics is interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical and logical modeling of natural language from a computational perspective. This modeling is not limited to any particular field of linguistics.

Purposes
There are two major purposes of computational linguistics:
 * 1) To help linguists study natural languages more easily
 * 2) To make it possible for ordinary people to use natural language when using a computer

Computational linguists often use large bodies of digitized text or speech called corpora as a basis for teaching computer programs the proper use of a language, or to compare the use of a language in one context to its use in another context. This is also called corpus linguistics.

Some of the practical uses of computational linguistics include:
 * Speech recognition
 * Speech production
 * Machine translation
 * Improvements to data mining, including  search engine design.

History
See also: ELIZA.

See Also: computational linguistics