Talk:Computational linguistics

Dear All,

I am painfully aware of the many names used for this area (CL, NLP, Language Engineering, Human Language Technology, Language Technology, ...). Many of these terms denote nearly identical areas, but not all. My experience is that, in many countries, one uses two separate concepts, one narrow and one broad:

1. The narrow one being defined (as also cited below by others) as a study of language using the methods and inspiration from computer science. This definition puts much weight on the automatic parsing, especially using linguistically motivated grammar models.
2. The broad concept includes the narrow one as its core, but also includes much material from the areas where the core methods can be applied. It is also common that speech technology is included as a part of the broad area.

I would not be alone in proposing that, in the Wikipedia, we would establish two concepts (=articles) one for the narrow one and use the title computational linguistics for it, and another with title language technology (or human language technology). Both could have an account of the possible synonyms or alternative terms. The distinction is, anyway present in many languages other than English (Finnish 'tietokonelingvistiikka' vs. 'kieliteknologia', Swedish, Danish and Norwegian roughly 'datalingvistik' vs. 'språkteknologi').

Together with some colleagues, we would like to use Wikipedia as a platform for creating consistent multilingual terminologies for CL/LT. This would be feasible if there are consistent concepts which can be linked between languages.

--
Kimmo Koskenniemi,
prof. of computational linguistic
(but teaching language technolgy)
--

HI....

I'm a student at a computational linguistics department (CoLi at Saarbruecken), and I have been a (visiting) student at a natural language processing department (HCRC at Edinburgh). I think each might have been close to being the biggest in the world in their respective "fields". But honestly, I can't tell the difference!!!

I think the key is: how are the terms commonly used? Once, (while I was stationed at Edinburgh but making a weekend trip to Cambridge), a Cambridge prof came up to me and said, "So, you're from Edinburgh, I bet you do NLP." Yes, I replied, not wanting to get into the details about really being from CoLi at Saarbruecken. "Heh," he says, "NLP is totally unfounded. At Cambridge, we do computational linguistics." Now (for those of us who are not irony impared ;) I think this is pretty strong evidence that the terms are used as synonyms within the field. And if they are used as synonyms within the field, then what exactly is this page describing?

PS... with the ACL quote... I think it might be decades old. If there is an "engineering/science" distinction between NLP and CL, then the ACL quote has got to be ironic because most of the research in their journal and at their conferences is clearly engineering.

-- pobody

I don't disagree that Natural Language Processing is useful and important. I'm just not convinced that Computational Linguistics is the same thing as Natural Language Processing.

According to the The Association for Computational Linguistics web page defining Computational Linguistics, ( http://www.aclweb.org/archive/what.html ) the definition is broader than appears on this page:

computational linguistics is the scientific study of language from a computational perspective. Computational linguists are interested in providing computational models of various kinds of linguistic phenomena.

i'm changing the article heavily and splitting large portions off into [Natural Language Processing] to reflect the fact that these two fields are related, but not at all the same thing. --jkominek

Well, but I do not think that NLP and CL do not overlap, I think they have a lot in common. At my university we do mostly NLP in computational linguistics. In the first year, there are the foundations (theoretical linguistics, computer science, logic, relations, trees, grammars), and the second year class is called "Natural language processing systems". According to the professor, computational linguistics IS about designing natural language processing systems. But I do not have anything written on my desk here (will deliver this later, ok?). I must also admit that he was CS prof before, so he may be biased ;-). Of course it is ok to have a separate entry, as CL and NLP are not synonyms.

I recommend to delete the sentence "... which is in the domain of computer science", as this implies NLP does not belong to CL. Instead, I would write "An important task of CL _is_ NLP" or sth. similar.

I also do not agree that CL is (only) a subfield of linguistics, as it is an interdisciplinary field, somewhere in between theoretical CS/maths, applied computer science, AI, and linguistics.

As I am new here, and still want to think about, I do not make changes immediatly (I also do not have the time atm to build proper, good-looking sentences, as I am at work).

Best regards,

-- zeno

Computational linguistics is the original term for the field of language processing that developed following the collapse of MT with the ALPAC report in the 1960s. Originally, it was thought that computers could perform translation of language quite easily, whereas in fact its exactly the opposite. I would characterize the difference between computational linguistics and natural language processing as the difference between computer science and software development, i.e., between the theoretical and the practical. Some computational linguists are not really interested in natural language processing and prefer to work exclusively on theoretical problems, whereas others are actual practitioners of the field--same as in computer science.

Also the assumption that computational linguists are linguists is wrong. Computational linguists came into the field from a variety of disciplines including mathematics, computer science and psychology. Computational linguistics predates AI. It is a separate and parallel field of those concerned with having computers process language in any way. It's major subfields include: speech generation, speech recognition, parsing theory, text generation and of course its original impetus, mechanical (or machine) translation.

Whereas today I expect you can easily study computational linguistics in a linguistics department, in the 1970s and early 1980s this was rare.

Dr. Robert A. Amsler, Sr. Computational Linguist, SEA/DOE

Computational linguistics would seem to involve more statistical (pattern recognition, markov, etc.) and NLP more determining parts of speech and trying to get meaning. Wouldn't it? User:KellyCoinGuy