1 computational linguistics an introduction

1 computational linguistics an introduction

• 2.
  The Association forComputational 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 computationallinguistics 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) definesComputational linguistics as the study of computer systems for understanding and generating natural language.
• 5.
  Computational linguistics isan 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 mainlyinterested 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’sand 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 andlanguage 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 theyhave 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 coursewill 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 smartphones 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 ofexpertise 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 centurywill 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 suchapplications, 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 ahundred 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?