What is Computational Linguistics?

The following picture attempts to give some idea of what computational linguistics is about

The idea is this: a sentence can be associated with an underlying, linguistic structure . Human beings use, and computers can be made to use, such structures to accomplish tasks would seem to require linguistic intelligence

Put another way, its about the scientific description of linguistic intelligence, and its computational realisation.

Thus in the centre of the picture above there is a very simple structure for the sentence when was Google founded ? ( more elaborate )

Such a structure can be put to use to accomplish such tasks as

• Question Answering
• Machine Translation
• Speech Synthesis
• Retrieving information from databases

These are the language-involving computational tasks shown in the picture above, but there are many many others such as

• speech recognition
• document summarisation
• extraction of information from documents for clustering or data-mining
• language generation