Computational Linguistics

Abstract

Computational linguistics grew out of early projects in machine translation. Initially it was conceived of as a branch of artificial intelligence with the goal of complete human-like language understanding, and was concerned with symbolic methods of parsing and semantic analysis. In recent years, because of more powerful computers, the development of machine-learning algorithms, and the rise of the World Wide Web, computational linguistics has taken an empiricist view of language processing that is based on corpora and statistical methods. It emphasizes practical applications with a tolerance for some degree of error.