Human vs programming languages
Natural language processing considers how human language can be generated or understood by a computer.
Design of language which can be translated to instructions understood by a compiler is considered elsewhere.
Descriptive vs prescriptive
Descriptive linguistics studies the language as it is actually used by a certain group of people. Prescriptive linguistics considers the language as it ‘ought’ to be used.
Themes
Computational linguistics tries to understand human language generation and comprehension using computer models.
Example applications/ problems
Authorship attribution.
Interaction with humans: Eg: IBM built ‘Watson’, a program which participates in the propular TV trivia show jeopardy, where it responds to phrases with questions to which they are an answer.
Human language acquisition.
Ambiguity: main challenge
Comprehension and generation of text is just translation between natural language and the language of logic. The ambiguity in natural language is the main problem in this process.
Following research
ACL> NACL (Held only when ACL is outside north america)> COLING.