25 Computational
Linguistics
RICHARD SPROAT, CHRISTER
SAMUELSSON, JENNIFER CHU-CARROLL,
and BOB CARPENTER
The field of computational linguistics is as diverse as linguistics itself, so giv-
ing a thorough overview of the entire field in the short space available for this
chapter is essentially impossible. We have therefore chosen to focus on four
relatively popular areas of inquiry:
• syntactic parsing;
• discourse analysis;
• computational morphology and phonology;
• corpus-based methods.
The order of presentation is motivated by historical considerations. Parsing
and discourse analysis have had the longest continuous history of investigation,
and are therefore presented first. Computational morphology and phonology
only really began to grow as a separate discipline in the mid-1980s. Corpus-
based approaches were, in fact, investigated as early as the 1960s (e.g., by
Zellig Harris (1970)), but the field fell into disrepute until the late 1980s, since
which time there has been a renaissance of work in this area.