A very brief introduction to computational linguistics
Ralph Grishman · 1989
The ability to automatically analyze and understand natural language opens up a wide variety of applications. One of the first was machine translation; after many years of a relatively low level of effort, this area has seen a strong resurgence in the 1980's. Another application area is information retrieval; since much of the world's store of information is in written texts, systems which could understand these texts and extract information on request would have great value. The general area which has seen the greatest activity is man-machine interfaces, and in particular "question-answering systems" (natural language interfaces for data base retrieval). Current systems are still quite primitive, but such interfaces should make computer systems much more accessible to computer-naive users in the future.