Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing

Computational linguistics (CL) is a discipline between linguistics & computer science, concerned with the computational aspects of the human language faculty. It belongs to the cognitive sciences, linguistics & overlaps with the field of artificial intelligence, a branch of computer science aiming at computational models of human cognition. Natural language processing also overlapping these fields, concerned with the interactions between computers & human languages providing the possibility of natural language interfaces to knowledge bases and natural language translation. CL develop formal models simulating aspects of the human language faculty & implement them as computer programs, which constitute the basis for the evaluation & further development of the theories. In addition to linguistic theories, findings from cognitive psychology play a major role in simulating linguistic competence. Within psychology, it is mainly the area of psycholinguistics that examines the cognitive processes constituting human language use. The relevance of computational modelling for psycholinguistic research is reflected in the emergence of a new sub discipline: computational psycholinguistics.