19.248 introductions to computational linguistics

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 19, No. 248.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

         Date: Sat, 03 Sep 2005 07:09:46 +0100
         From: Ms Mary Dee Harris <marydeeh_at_yahoo.com>
         Subject: Re: 19.243 introductions to computational linguistics

In defining "computational linguistics" one must
distinguish between different intentions. The
article that Norman Hinton pointed to equates
Computational Linguistics with Natural Language
Processing. Many people use the terms
interchangably, but others make important
distinctions.

Most courses in Computational Linguistics are taught
in Linguistics departments, but not all. Courses in
NLP are generally taught in Computer Science
departments. But those are generalities, not
statistically based.

Some from the linguistics perspective use the term
"computational linguistics" to mean "using computers
to study linguistics" whereas "natural language
processing" usually means "using computers to
manipulate language data," for whatever means. For
example, NLP covers machine translation, natural
language understanding, natural language generation,
summarization of text, and some aspects of speech
recognition and processing, but some people would say
that computational linguistics deals with all those.
It depends on who is defining and using the terms.

In recent years, NLP has moved more toward statistical
analysis of corpora for production of resources to
enable more accurate processing of language. Many NLP
systems are now hybrid systems using both symbolic and
statistical methods. I'll have to let someone else
speak from the linguistic perspective.

My work for the last few years has been in a
commercial environment producing English narratives
from clinical medical data. I believe there will be
more and more opportunities in industry for production
systems, whereas almost all jobs in the past were
research oriented. After working in NLP for 30
years, it's gratifying to see the research come to
fruition and be applied to real-world problems.

Mary Dee Harris
Chief Language Officer
Catalis, Inc.
Austin, Texas

--- "Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard
McCarty <willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk>)"
<willard_at_LISTS.VILLAGE.VIRGINIA.EDU> wrote:

> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 19,
> No. 243.
> Centre for Computing in the Humanities,
> King's College London
>
> www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
> www.princeton.edu/humanist/
> Submit to:
> humanist_at_princeton.edu
>
> [1] From: Norman Hinton
> <hinton_at_springnet1.com> (4)
> > activities in
> computational linguistics?
>
> [2] From: Norman Hinton
> <hinton_at_springnet1.com> (7)
> Subject: Re: 19.241 introductions to
> activities in
> computational linguistics?
>
>
>
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
> Date: Fri, 02 Sep 2005 07:08:38 +0100
> From: Norman Hinton <hinton_at_springnet1.com>
> Subject: Re: 19.241 introductions to
> activities in
> computational linguistics?
>
> Willard, just to get started, you might have people
> look at a very
> short and somewhat restricted introduction to CL
> from the University
> of Saarland:
>
>
http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~hansu/what_is_cl.html
>
>
>
>
>
>
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
> Date: Fri, 02 Sep 2005 07:09:41 +0100
> From: Norman Hinton <hinton_at_springnet1.com>
> Subject: Re: 19.241 introductions to
> activities in
> computational linguistics?
>
> This presentation, from Zurich, is both longer and
> better (and
> clearer) than the Saarland page:
>
> http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/groups/CL/CL_FAQ.html
>
>
>
> Dr Willard McCarty | Reader in Humanities Computing
> | Centre for
> Computing in the Humanities | King's College London
> | Kay House, 7
> Arundel Street | London WC2R 3DX | U.K. | +44 (0)20
> 7848-2784 fax:
> -2980 || willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk
> www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/
>
>

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Received on Sat Sep 03 2005 - 19:12:21 EDT