Computational Linguistics :: Essays Papers

Computational Linguistics Computational linguistics is a discipline between linguistics and computer science which is concerned with the computational aspects of the human language. This area of computer science overlaps with the field of Artificial Intelligence. Basically, computational linguistics is a series of programs that interprets human speech into words and actions. There are a couple of different areas of computational linguistics and those areas are theoretical computational linguistics and applied computational linguistics. Each one of those areas are divided up into more areas. Theoretical computational linguistics is composed of theoretical linguistics and cognitive science. This particular area deals with formal theories about the linguistic knowledge that a human needs for generating and understanding language. This area has advanced so much, and has become so complex that it can only be managed by using computers. With these computers computational linguists develop formal models simulating aspects of the human language and then incorporates that into programs. These programs that they write constitute the basis for the evaluation and further development of their theories. Along with these theories there is another part that plays a big role in theoretical computational linguistics and that part is cognitive sciences. What I mean by that is that part of these programs interprets what is being said and then it matches it up to what is in its programming. The other part of computational linguistics is called applied computational linguistics which focuses on the practical outcome of modeling human language use. The methods, techniques, tools, and applications in this area are often subsumed under the term language engineering or (human language technology. The current computational linguistic systems are far from achieving human ability of communicating they have numerous applications. The goal for this is to eventually have a computer program that will have the same communication skills as a human being. Once this is achieved it will open doors never thought possible in computing. After all the major problem today with computing is communication with the computer. Today’s computers don’t really understand our language and it is very difficult to learn computer language, plus computer language doesn’t correspond to the structure of human thought.