M. A. I english P. C3 & C6 Modern Linguistics title pmd

Computational Linguistics : 
Ours is the age of information and technology. Every day we get 
information about different issues around through the medium of 
newspapers, magazines, radio, television, computers, internet, etc. This 
information needs processing before it is fed to the internet through the 
medium of computers and smartphones. Whatever we type on the screen get 
converted into natural human language. This is basically a miracle. Yet, 
human beings have made it possible by constantly working on different 
technological tools.
There are thousands of questions that haunt us. How is it that I press 
some keys on the keyboard and the message gets typed in the language in 
which I want it? (I type the same keys for Marathi and English but by using 
only one command, I can type in Marathi and the very next moment I can 
switch over to English.) How do the dictionaries work? How does a computer 
know that I have made a spelling mistake? How is it possible for me to get 
some information on any topic on internet? And that too in the language I 
want? How do these ‘google translators’ work?
For all this modern man has invented some tools and he feeds these 
tools with some language. This language is artificial language. It is different 
from the natural language we speak. Natural language differs from the 
artificial language. Artificial languages have digital or analogue encoding 
system while natural languages have sounds and scripts. A computer does 

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not understand what we speak in Marathi or even in English. It understands 
only digital or analogue codes designed for them. These codes are language 
of computers. We try to convert our language into computer language so as 
to feed our own information in our own language.
The processing of natural language has become one of the main 
problems in information exchange. The rapid development of computers in 
the last four decades has made possible the implementation of many ideas to 
solve the problems that one could not even imagine being solved 
automatically. However, this needed some use of language encoding system. 
‘Intelligent natural language processing is based on the science called 
computational linguistics’ (Bolshakov & Gelbukh, 2004, p.17).
Computational linguistics attempts to get computers perform some 
useful tasks involving human languages such as enabling human-machine 
communication, improving human-human communication, language data in 
the form of emails, blogs, etc. The field is largely occupied with machine 
translation, information search, automatic questions-answers, speech 
recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, text understanding, etc. 
This is a new field of linguistic enquiry having a lot of scope all over 
the world.