Computational linguistics

Computational linguistics has since 2020s became a near-synonym of either natural language processing or language technology, with deep learning approaches, such as large language models, overperforming the specific approaches previously used in the field. The field overlapped with artificial intelligence since the efforts in the United States in the 1950s to use computers to automatically translate texts from foreign languages, particularly Russian scientific journals, into English. Since rule-based approaches were able to make arithmetic (systematic) calculations much faster and more accurately than humans, it was expected that lexicon, morphology, syntax and semantics can be learned using explicit rules, as well. After the failure of rule-based approaches, David Hays coined the term in order to distinguish the field from AI and co-founded both the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL) in the 1970s and 1980s. What started as an effort to translate between languages evolved into a much wider field of natural language processing. In order to be able to meticulously study the English language, an annotated text corpus was much needed. The Penn Treebank was one of the most used corpora. It consisted of IBM computer manuals, transcribed telephone conversations, and other texts, together containing over 4.5 million words of American English, annotated using both part-of-speech tagging and syntactic bracketing. Japanese sentence corpora were analyzed and a pattern of log-normality was found in relation to sentence length. The fact that during language acquisition, children are largely only exposed to positive evidence, meaning that the only evidence for what is a correct form is provided, and no evidence for what is not correct, was a limitation for the models at the time because the now available deep learning models were not available in late 1980s.

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