Computational linguistics is the area of common interest between linguistics and computer science.  It has developed because of the need to have computers deal intelligently with human language as humans use it.

What is computational linguistics?

   1  Computational Phonetics
and Phonology

Studying computational phonetics and phonology
helps us understand why humans are so adept at decoding
speech, yet computers cannot be easily taught to do so.

Check out this site for more information:
http://coli.uni-sb.de/fr/department.html
 

2  Computational Morphology

Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words.
Research in computational morphology came about as a
by-product of developing natural language processing systems.

Check out this site for more information:
http://www.sil.org/computing/comp-morph-phon.html

3  Computational Syntax

There are two main reasons research began in the area of computational
syntax.  One was due to the practical motivation from attempts
to build working systems to analyze and generate language.  The other was
due to a desire on the part of theoretical linguists to use the
computer as a tool to demonstrate that a particular theory is internally consistent.

Check out this site for more information:
http://www.nyu.edu/pages/linguistics/ling.html
 

4  Computational Lexicology

Computational lexicology refers to the "repository of whatever information
a particular system needs."  In order to generate a sentence the lexical entry
must include: part of speech, sense number, subcategorization, and semantic properties.

Check out this site for more information:
http://www.deGruyter.de/journals/lexicol/

5  Computational Semantics

The two approaches used in language analysis and semantics are syntactically based
and semantically based.  Their goal is to establish meaning in words, sentence and text.

Check out this site for more information:
http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~fracas/other_projects.html
 

6  Practical Applications of
Computational Linguistics
 

An application is a program generated to perform a specific function for the user,
or in some cases, for another application program.

Early applications included the following five:

Check out these sites for more information:
http://www.sls.lcs.mit.edu/sls/whatwedo/applications.html

Index/concordance:
http://lcweb.loc.gov/lexico/liv/brsearch.html

The Center for Networked Information Discovery and
Retrieval has a helpful site on information access and retrieval:
http://www.cnidr.org/ir/ir.html

Machine translation:
http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/research/ilash/Moby/

Speech recognition/Speech synthesis:
Scientific American, Suggest 1999 features an article
"Talking with your Computer" by Victor Zue:
http://www.sciam.com/1999/0899issue/0899zue.html

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Other Interesting Sites:

Association of Computational Linguistics

Journal:  Computational Linguistics

Conversing with Computers

Androids --you must see this to believe it!
http://www/androidworld.com/prod19.htm
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Points To Ponder:

How do the advances in computational linguistics aid
people who are physically challenged?

How close are we to having androids that function as humans?
What technology is needed for androids to be generated?

What is the information a computer needs in order
to generate a computational lexicon?