Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. It combines computer science, linguistics, and artificial intelligence to understand and process human language. The field is concerned with understanding written and spoken language from a computational perspective, and it is the scientific and engineering discipline that addresses these concerns.
The field of computational linguistics emerged in the 1950s with the first attempts at machine translation. Early work focused on rule-based approaches, but in the late 1980s, the introduction of machine learning algorithms on a large scale led to a statistical revolution in the field. This shift was marked by the increasing use of statistical models, which are now the dominant approach in the field.
Computational linguistics is the theoretical and practical foundation for many applications of natural language processing (NLP), including machine translation, speech recognition, and sentiment analysis. It has become a crucial area of research and development in the age of big data and artificial intelligence. The field has grown rapidly in recent years, with a large number of academic conferences, journals, and associations dedicated to the subject. It is also a major area of research and development in the technology industry, with companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft investing heavily in the field.