Probabilistic methods in computational linguistics
Computational linguistics : Probabilistic methods Computational linguistics seeks to describe methods for natural language processing, that is, for processing human languages by automatic means. Since the advent of electronic computers in the late 1940s, human language processing has been an area of active research; machine translation in particular attracted early interest. Indeed, the inspiration for computing machines was the creation of a thinking automaton, a machina sapiens, and language is perhaps the most distinctively human cognitive capacity. In early work on artificial intelligence, there was something of a competition between discrete, “symbolic” reasoning and stochastic systems, particularly neural nets. But the indispensability of a firm probabilistic basis for dealing with uncertainty was soon recognized. In computational linguistics, by contrast, the presumption of the sufficiency of grammatical and logical constraints, supplemented perhaps by ad hoc heuristics, was muc...