ABSTRACT
Although the computer has its origins in the ‘Analytical Engine’ conceived by Charles Babbage in the 1830s, it was not until 1946 that the first electronic computing machine was built, in the United States, as a result of the need to carry out large numbers of mathematical calculations at high speed in connection with weapons systems in the Second World War. The term ‘computer’ thus describes accurately the main use of the earliest machines. Today, numerical applications continue to be important in scientific and technological areas; however, a vast amount of computer power is expended on problems which, although often involving a quantitative dimension, do not use numbers as their primary source of data. Among these applications are a large and increasingly important range of uses which are concerned with work on natural languages, and it is with these that we shall be concerned in the present chapter. As will quickly become apparent, the scope and complexity of such applications is considerable, so that this survey can do no more than provide a summary and selected examples, together with references in which readers can follow up areas of particular interest to them.
