What Is Computational Linguistics?

Computational Linguistics is a complicated term for a pretty simple idea: "getting computers to speak and understand the language that you and I speak". 

Chances are you've already seen the benefits of computational linguistics research in your day-to-day life.  Voice recognition, speech synthesis and machine translation are popular subfields of it, but it also includes others such as information retrieval, intelligent web searching (Google and other search engines are perfect examples of this) and intelligent spell-checking.

It's a wide, interdisciplinary field of research that's been around since the early 1970s, and lots of computer programming and linguistics expertise goes into it.  It's a subfield of artificial intelligence and is often known under these names too:

• Natural Language Processing or NLP
• Language Engineering
• or just "CL" (for Computational Linguistics)

Visit the University of Toronto's Computational Linguistics Department for more information.