What is computational linguistics?
Computational linguistics deals with the question of how a machine can handle natural language or, in other words, deal with language models or construct them that enable goals such as the precise machine translation of language or the simulation of artificial intelligence.
In general, computational linguistics involves looking at the nature of a language, its morphology, syntax, and dynamic usage, and drawing from this observation all sorts of useful models to help machines handle language. Experts point out that the evolving models for computational linguistics are much more difficult than the applications that computers were first used in, which is handling quantitative data.
Practical applications of computational linguistics include text-to-speech software that tries to understand what someone is saying in order to translate it into digital text. There are also various models that make it possible to use machines to understand how language is acquired.
However, the ultimate goal of enabling machines to simulate human speech responses associated with 'higher thinking' has been an ongoing development that still leaves a lot of room for improvement. One theory is that machines will at some point acquire the ability to simulate real human conversation and thus become generally more intelligent through heuristic models and other processes that go far beyond the mere collection of data and quantitative calculations of this data.