What is "computational linguistics"

n. (context linguistics computer science English) An interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical and/or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective. This modeling is not limited to any particular field of linguistics.

n. the use of computers for linguistic research and applications

Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective.

Traditionally, computational linguistics was usually performed by computer scientists who had specialized in the application of computers to the processing of a natural language. Computational linguists often work as members of interdisciplinary teams, including linguists (specifically trained in linguistics), language experts (persons with some level of ability in the languages relevant to a given project), and computer scientists. In general, computational linguistics draws upon the involvement of linguists, computer scientists, experts in artificial intelligence, mathematicians, logicians, philosophers, cognitive scientists, cognitive psychologists, psycholinguists, anthropologists and neuroscientists, among others.

Computational linguistics has theoretical and applied components, where theoretical computational linguistics takes up issues in theoretical linguistics and cognitive science, and applied computational linguistics focuses on the practical outcome of modeling human language use.

Computational Linguistics is a peer-reviewed academic journal in the field of computational linguistics. It is published quarterly by MIT Press for the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). The journal includes articles, squibs and book reviews.

The journal was established as the American Journal of Computational Linguistics in 1974 by David Hays and was originally published only as microfiche until 1978. George Heidorn transformed it into a print journal in 1980, with quarterly publication. In 1984 the journal was renamed Computational Linguistics. Since 2009, it has become an online-only open access journal, freely available to anyone.