Computational Linguistics - Subfields

Subfields

Computational linguistics can be divided into major areas depending upon the medium of the language being processed, whether spoken or textual; and upon the task being performed, whether analyzing language (recognition) or synthesizing language (generation).

Speech recognition and speech synthesis deal with how spoken language can be understood or created using computers. Parsing and generation are sub-divisions of computational linguistics dealing respectively with taking language apart and putting it together. Machine translation remains the sub-division of computational linguistics dealing with having computers translate between languages.

Some of the areas of research that are studied by computational linguistics include:

• Computational complexity of natural language, largely modeled on automata theory, with the application of context-sensitive grammar and linearly bounded Turing machines.
• Computational semantics comprises defining suitable logics for linguistic meaning representation, automatically constructing them and reasoning with them
• Computer-aided corpus linguistics
• Design of parsers or chunkers for natural languages
• Design of taggers like POS-taggers (part-of-speech taggers)
• Machine translation as one of the earliest and most difficult applications of computational linguistics draws on many subfields.
• Simulation and study of language evolution in historical linguistics/glottochronology.

The Association for Computational Linguistics defines computational linguistics as:

...the scientific study of language from a computational perspective. Computational linguists are interested in providing computational models of various kinds of linguistic phenomena.