Insight to Computational Linguistics

The field of computational linguistics (CL), together with its engineering area of natural language processing (NLP), has burst out in recent years. It has emerged rapidly from a relatively unclear accessory of both AI and formal linguistics into a blooming scientific discipline. It has also become an important area of business development. The focus of research in CL and NLP has shifted over the past three decades from the study of small prototypes and theoretical models to robust learning and processing systems applied to large corpora [1]. For the last two centuries, human race has effectively coped with the computerization of many tasks using automatic and electrical devices, and these devices realistically help people in their everyday life. In the second half of the twentieth century, human consideration has turned to the automation of natural language processing. Community now wants assistance not only in automatic, but also in rational efforts. They would like the machine to read an unwary text, to test it for correctness, to carry out the instructions contained in the text, or even to realize it well enough to produce a reasonable reply based on its meaning. Intelligent natural language processing is based on the science called computational linguistics. Computational linguistics is closely connected with applied linguistics and linguistics in general [2].This paper intends to provide an introduction to the major areas of CL, and an impression of current work in this area