Computers and Language

Computational linguistics – how computers process human language.

involves:   development of computer languages (actually not real languages)

               computer processing of texts

               development of machine translation

               role of human language in creating artificial intelligence

Text processing – computers scan corpus, providing quick computational data about word frequency and other mathematical aspects of text.

Ideal for creating glossaries, concordances

Computers that talk and listen – can produce and respond to human voice within a very limited range of acoustic variation

The sound spectrograph can translate speech vibrations into a visual readout called a sound spectrogram

Automatic machine translation (since 1940's)

takes a source language text (the language to be translated) and produces a translation in the target language   

Not very successful.  Only dictionaries and phrasal translation banks have been created.

Grammatical and semantic analysis of sentences

In some ways, computers are less adept at language than small children

         -They have some difficulty parsing sentences correctly

         -They have special difficulty when confronted with ambiguity

         -The most powerful computers overgenerate possible meanings, while human tend naturally to filter out the improbable ones

So far, computers have not replaced the translator or the linguist (Hurray!)

Or even the relatively uneducated native speaker