ABSTRACT
Computational linguistics is the scientific discipline concerned with understanding written and spoken language from a computational perspective, and building devices that usefully process and produce language in various settings. It is basically a branch of linguistics which deals with applications of techniques of computer science to the analysis and synthesis of language and speech. To have a better understanding of computational linguistics, knowing what linguistics is, is a prerequisite. This chapter presents an introduction to linguistics. The primary concern of computational linguistics is computational modeling of linguistic processes to support the development of software applications that do useful things with language. Cognitive science, philosophy, psychology and mathematics are some of the areas from which insights are taken in computational linguistics. The first project undertaken in computational linguistics was machine translation (MT). With the ever-increasing availability of unstructured data, governments are searching for ways to better process and understand this information and, therefore, are looking for skilled computational linguists to hire.
