What is Computational Linguistics

Computational linguistics is a wide-ranging discipline that centered, roughly, around the application of computer technology and computational techniques to linguistic problems and the development of natural language technology.

There are a couple good introductions to the discipline available on the Web. Take a look at:

• Wikipedia article on Computational Linguistics
• Hans Uszkoreit's "What is Computational Linguistics?"

Also, two of the most important organizations in the field are:

• The Association for Computational Linguistics
• The International Committee on Computational Linguistics which hosts Coling, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics.

There have been some humorous takes on computational linguistics in recent internet web comics:

• Taking a jab at computational linguistics from xkcd.
• The value of learning a scripting language from xkcd. Discussion on Language Log.
• An NLP-solving dinosaur from Dinosaur comics.