- Author: [[Wikipedia]] - Full Title: Computational Linguistics - Wikipedia - Tags:: [[Artificial Intelligence]] [[Computational Linguistics]] [[Key problems in computational linguistics]] - URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_linguistics - ### Highlights first synced by [[Readwise]] [[2020-09-16]] - Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, computational linguistics draws upon linguistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, math, logic, philosophy, cognitive science, cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, anthropology and neuroscience, among others. - computational linguistics emerged as an area of artificial intelligence performed by computer scientists who had specialized in the application of computers to the processing of a natural language. - The term "computational linguistics" is nowadays (2020) taken to be a near-synonym of natural language processing (NLP) and (human) language technology. These terms put a stronger emphasis on aspects of practical applications rather than theoretical inquiry and since the 2000s, they have largely replaced the term "computational linguistics" in the NLP community. - recent interdisciplinary studies that borrow concepts from biological studies, especially gene mapping, have proved to produce more sophisticated analytical tools and more reliable results. - `To translate one language into another, it was observed that one had to understand the grammar of both languages, including both morphology (the grammar of word forms) and syntax (the grammar of sentence structure). To understand syntax, one had to also understand the semantics and the lexicon (or 'vocabulary'), and even something of the pragmatics of language use. Thus, what started as an effort to translate between languages evolved into an entire discipline devoted to understanding how to represent and process natural languages using computers. ` - Human language development does provide some constraints which make it harder to apply a computational method to understanding it. For instance, during language acquisition, human children are largely only exposed to positive evidence. This means that during the linguistic development of an individual, the only evidence for what is a correct form is provided, and no evidence for what is not correct. - One of the most important pieces of being able to study linguistic structure is the availability of large linguistic corpora or samples. - **Note**: Maybe [[Satina]]'s [[Wordsmithing]] could revolve around distinguishing between changes of languages that [[Indy]] uses, because machines can't (yet) do that without sufficient samples. - `One of the most cited English linguistic corpora is the Penn Treebank. Derived from widely-different sources, such as IBM computer manuals and transcribed telephone conversations, this corpus contains over 4.5 million words of American English. ` - `Using computational methods, Japanese sentence corpora were analyzed and a pattern of log-normality was found in relation to sentence length. Though the exact cause of this lognormality remains unknown, it is precisely this sort of information which computational linguistics is designed to uncover. ` - That is to say, comprehension is only half the problem of communication. The other half is how a system produces language, and computational linguistics has made interesting discoveries in this area. - Alan Turing: computer scientist and namesake developer of the Turing test as a method of measuring the intelligence of a machine. - `In a now famous paper published in 1950 Alan Turing proposed the possibility that machines might one day have the ability to "think". As a thought experiment for what might define the concept of thought in machines, he proposed an "imitation test" in which a human subject has two text-only conversations, one with a fellow human and another with a machine attempting to respond like a human. Turing proposes that if the subject cannot tell the difference between the human and the machine, it may be concluded that the machine is capable of thought. Today this test is known as the Turing test and it remains an influential idea in the area of artificial intelligence. ` - For example, in the phrase "It seems that you hate me" ELIZA understands "you" and "me" which matches the general pattern "you [some words] me", allowing ELIZA to update the words "you" and "me" to "I" and "you" and replying "What makes you think I hate you?". In this example ELIZA has no understanding of the word "hate", but it is not required for a logical response in the context of this type of psychotherapy. - ### New highlights added [[2020-09-17]] at 2:54 AM - The 2016 film Arrival (film), based on [[Ted Chiang]]′s [[Book/Story of Your Life]], takes a whole new approach of linguistics to communicate with advanced alien race called heptapods.