COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS

What is computational linguistics?

Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field between linguistics and computer science. It's focus is the processing of natural language with computers. Typical applications are natural language understanding systems up to language-driven robots or machine translation systems. The methods used in computational linguistics are either formal models of linguistic knowledge (symbolic methods) or statistical models which are automatically extracted from language data (statistical methods). Actually these contrary methods more and more grow together.

What is the job of a computational linguist?

Usually, a computational linguist is specialized for a specific topic inside the field. The specialization tends either more in the linguistic or the computer science direction. If the topic is linguistics, then there is often a further specialization for certain linguistic topics like phonology, morphology, syntax or semantics. For computer science specialists are the processing methods most important. These methods include symbolic ones, like parsing, finite-state techniques and grammar formalisms, or statistical methods in the context of machine learning. Computational linguist reserchers are primarily concerned with reading, writing, programming and experiments, while those working in the industry are merely concerned with implementing software adressed to the market.