3 What is Computational Linguistics?

• Computational Linguistics is a large discipline like computer science or mathematics.

• The central question is: How can we make a computer understand natural language?

• We will not answer this question during this course. We will even not try to do so. But perhaps, we will succeed in giving you some insights about the state of the art in computational linguistics today.

• There are many subdisciplines of computational linguistics:

  • Syntax

  • Semantics

  • Pragmatics

  • Discourse

  • Morphology

  • Speach

  • ...

  We will only care about syntax and semantics of written language.

• 3.1 What are we doing in Syntax?

• 3.2 What are we doing in Semantics?

• 3.3 Demo Systems