Computational Linguistics

Abstract

Linguistics is concerned with rules that are followed by languages as a system. Computational linguistics (CL) combines the power of machine learning and human language. As a subfield of linguistics, CL is concerned with the computational description of rules that languages follow. It is what powers anything in a machine or device that has to do with language—speaking, writing, reading, and listening. It is often linked with natural language processing (NLP), which is the use of computers to identify structures in natural language. The boundary between NLP and CL is not so clear-cut. This paper is a primer on computational linguistics.