What is computational linguistics and language technology?

Computational linguistics is the interdisciplinary study of language phenomena from a computational perspective. The goal of computational linguistics is to model human language either for theoretical or applied purposes. Applications of computational linguistics include programs/systems to:

• translate documents from one language to another,
• detect and correct grammar and spelling errors,
• automatically recognize and/or produce spoken language,
• search and retrieve documents or information,
• facilitate language learning, and
• many, many others!

Good places to start if you want to learn more about this field:

• A description of computational linguistics from Wikipedia.
• FAQ about natural language processing from newsgroup comp.ai.nat-lang
• If you want to see which universities offer courses in CLLT, there is a very comprehensive recent Summary of NLP Courses around the world at the ACL website
• The AI Topics website at AAAI also has some good basic information.