The document discusses the field of computational linguistics. It defines computational linguistics as the scientific study of language from a computational perspective, involving linguists, computer scientists, and others. The history of computational linguistics is closely tied to the development of digital computers and early applications included machine translation. Computational linguistics research includes areas like speech recognition, natural language processing, and machine translation.

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Computational Linguistics
 INTRODUCTION
 DEFINITION
 HISTORY OF COMPUTER
 ORIGINS OF COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS
 APPLICATION AREAS
 APPROACHES
 CONCLUSION
 REFERENCES
Introduction
Traditionally, computational linguistics was usually performed by computer scientists
specialized in the application of computers to the processing of a natural language.
Computational linguists often work as members of interdisciplinary teams, including linguists
(specifically trained in linguistics), language experts (persons with some level of ability in the
languages relevant to a given project), and computer scientists. In general, computational
linguistics involves linguists, computer scientists, experts in artificial intelligence,
mathematicians, logicians, philosophers, cognitive scientists, cognitive psychologists,
psycholinguists, anthropologists and neuroscientists, among others.
Definitions
Different people have defined computational linguistics almost in the same way. Here are some
definitions;

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 Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical or rule-
based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective.
 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.”
 Igor Bolshakov and Alexander Gelbukh define Computational Linguistics in the book
“Computational Linguistics” in these words, “Computational Linguistics might be
considered as a synonym of automatic processing of natural language, since the main task
of computational linguistics is just the construction of computer programs to process
words and texts in natural language.”
 Computational Linguistics is the scientific study of language from a computational
perspective. Computational linguists are interested in providing computational models of
various kinds of linguistic phenomena. These models may be :knowledge based” (“hand-
crafted”) or data-driven” (“statistical” or “empirical”)
 Ralph Grisman in his book “Computational Linguistics: An Introduction,” published by
Cambridge University Press 1986 has this to say; “Computational linguistics is the study
of computer systems for understanding and generating natural language.”
History of the Digital Computer
It is not a surprise that the history of Computational Linguistics is closely connected to the
development of the digital computer. The theoretical foundations of Computational linguistics
are in the field of mathematical linguistics, formal language theory and in the field of

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information theory. The first application of Computational Linguistics was in the area of
machine translation. Therefore, the first professional organization was called Association for
Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics.
In 1939, John J. Atanasoff designs a prototype for the ABC (Atanasoff-Berry Computer) with the
help of graduate student Clifford Berry at Iowa State College. In 1973 a judge ruled it the first
automatic digital computer.
In 1941, Colossus computer designed by M.H.A. Neuman at the university of Manchester
England, building on ideas of Alan M. Turing used by British code breakers during the World
War II.
In electronics, a vacuum tube is a device used to amplify, switch, otherwise modify or create an
electrical signal. These enabled the development of electronics technology (radio, TV, radar,
Hifi, telephone networks, digital computers and industrial process control.
For most purposes, the vacuum tube has been replaced by solid-state semiconductor devices such
as transistors and diodes. These are smaller, more efficient, more reliable and cheaper – either as
discrete devices or integrated circuits. However tubes are still used in monitors (cathode ray
tube) and microwave ovens (magnetron)
In 1951, Remington Rand builds the first commercial Universal Automatic Computer
(UNIVAC) bettering the performance.
The First Natural Language Processing Application

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After this, computer was started being used in bi-lingual Dictionaries in the processing of
Natural Language. In 1947, Donald Booth and D.H.V. Britten worked out a detailed code for
realizing dictionary translation on a digital computer. Next year, R.H. Richens worked out a
stem-affix encoding with a longest-match strategy for stem identification and translation.
Origin of Computational Linguistics
Computational linguistics originated with efforts in the United States in the 1950s to use
computers to automatically translate texts from foreign languages, particularly Russian scientific
journals, into English. Since computers can make arithmetic calculations much faster and more
accurately than humans, it was thought they would process language with the same remarkable
capacity.
When machine translation/mechanical translation failed in accurate translations, automated
processing of human languages was recognized as far more complex than had originally been
assumed. Computational linguistics was born as the name of the new field of study devoted to
developing algorithms and software for intelligently processing language data. When artificial
intelligence came into existence in the 1960s, the field of computational linguistics became that
sub-division of artificial intelligence dealing with human-level comprehension and production of
natural languages.
For translation from one language into another, it was observed that one had to understand the
grammar of both languages, including both morphology and syntax. In order to understand
syntax, one had to also understand the semantics and the lexicon and even to understand
something of the pragmatics of language use. Thus, what started as an effort to translate between

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languages evolved into an entire discipline devoted to understanding how to represent and
process natural languages using computers.
L(A) Grammar+morphology+syntax+semantics+lexicon+pragmtics L(B)
Nowadays research within the scope of computational linguistics is done at computational
linguistics departments, computational linguistics laboratories, computer science departments,
and linguistics departments.
Application Areas
Computational Linguistics can be used in language processing for machine translation, speech
recognition, speech synthesis and man-machine interfaces. It can also be put to use in language
learning, language description (computer aided dialectology) . moreover, it can be applied in
intelligent word processing (spelling correction, grammar correction) document management
(find relevant docuents in collections, establish authorship of documents, catch plagiarism,
extract information from documents, classify documents, summarize documents and summarize
document collections).
Approaches
Just as computational linguistics can be performed by experts in a variety of fields, and through a
plethora of departments, so too can the research fields open a diverse range of topics. There are
four main areas of discourse:
1) developmental linguistics,

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2) structural linguistics,
3) linguistic production, and
4) linguistic comprehension.
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)

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 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.
Conclusion
So we may say that with the passage of time use of computer is penetrating into other disciplines
and field of life, computer and linguistics will still have to go long way. The work and research
to generate and comprehend natural human language is on and it is hope that mankind will
succeed in communicating to machines effectively as and when they need and vice versa.
References
1. Wikipedia
2. Igor Bolshakov and Alexander Gelbukh “Computational Linguistics”
3. Website of The association of Computational Linguistics
4. Ralph Grisman “Computational Linguistics: An Introduction,” Cambridge University
Press 1986