The document discusses the field of computational linguistics, defining it as the scientific study of language from a computational perspective. It involves providing computational models of linguistic phenomena and using computational techniques and linguistic theories to solve problems in natural language processing. Computational linguistics aims to automatically process and understand natural language by constructing computer programs. The field has its roots in the 1940s-1950s with the development of code breaking machines and computers. Major conferences and journals in the field are associated with the Association for Computational Linguistics.

2. The Association for Computational linguistics defines CL
as the scientific study of language from a
computational perspective.
Computational linguists are interested in providing
computational models of various kinds of linguistic
phenomena.

3. Work in computational linguistics is in some cases
motivated from a scientific perspective in that one is
trying to provide a computational explanation for a
particular linguistic or psycholinguistic phenomenon.
Computational linguistics is the application of
linguistic theories and computational techniques to
problems of natural language processing.

4. Grishman (1986) defines Computational
linguistics as the study of computer
systems for understanding and generating
natural language.

5. Computational linguistics is an automatic process (lr
aeiou to AEIOU) 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.
Actually, this course is slightly “more linguistic than
computational,” for the following reasons:

6. We are mainly interested in the formal description of
language relevant to automatic language
processing, rather than in purely algorithmic issues.
The algorithms, the corresponding programs, and
the programming technologies can vary, while the
basic linguistic principles and methods of their
description are much more stable.

7. Foundational Insights: 1940’s and 1950’s
The earliest roots of the field date to the period just
after World War II which gave rise to the computer
itself.
The ENIGMA cipher machine was used by the German
military in World War II.
The US and Britain secretly broke the ENIGMA codes.

8. Historically, speech and language processing has been treated very
differently, Natural Language Processing in Computer Science,
Speech Recognition in Electrical Engineering, Computational
Linguistics in linguistics, and Computational Psycholinguistics in
Psychology.

9.  Later they have come up with :
 The conferences and journals most centrally concerned with
computational linguistics and natural language processing are
associated with the Association for Computational Linguistics
(ACL),
Its European counterpart (EACL), and the International Conference on
Computational Linguistics (COLING).
The annual proceedings of ACL and EACL, and the biennial COLING
conference are the primary forums for work in this area.
The journal of Computational Linguistics is the premier publication in the
field.

10.  The course will teach more of theoretical methods and less
of practical skills, namely basic programming of Perl,
Python.
Growth of information technology - hardly anyone who is
left.
The more its use increases, the more the need for
machines to understand human language or simulate
human language performance.

11. Instruments like smart phones and automated information
systems like the announcements about the next station in a
Global Positioning System (GPS) enabled city bus or a metro
train is becoming indispensable every day.
We are living in times when some learn through machines
and a few others earn through the machines.

12. Their area of expertise can be viewed from anywhere in the
world and for many of the services they can provide, they
can be hired online.
All these are possible because of some major achievements in
information technology, in general, and Computational
Linguistics, in particular.

13. The 21st century will be the century of the total
information revolution.
The development of the tools for the automatic
processing of the natural language spoken in a
country or a whole group of countries is extremely
important for the country to be competitive both in
science and technology.

14. To develop such applications, specialists in computer
science need to have adequate tools to investigate
language with a view to its automatic processing.
One of such tools is a deep knowledge of both
computational linguistics and general linguistic
science.

15. Linguistics has a hundred year history as a scientific
discipline, and Computational Linguistics has 50-60 years
history as a part of Computer Science.
But it is only in the last 5-10 years that language
understanding has emerged as an industry, reaching
millions of people with information retrieval and machine
translation (available on the internet) and Speech
Recognition becoming popular on desktop computers.
This is an exciting time to be working in speech and language
processing.
Brief of Computational Linguistics

16. Any question?