Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical and/or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective. This modeling is not limited to any particular field of linguistics. Traditionally, computational linguistics was usually performed by computer scientists who had specialized in the application of computers to the processing of a natural language. Recent research has shown that human language is much more complex than previously thought, so computational linguists often work as members of interdisciplinary teams, including linguists (specifically trained in linguistics), language experts (persons with some level of ability in the languages relevant to a given project), and computer scientists. Computational linguistics draws upon the involvement of linguists, computer scientists, experts in artificial intelligence, cognitive psychologists, mathematicians, and logicians, amongst others.

Computational linguistics as a field predates artificial intelligence, a field under which it is often grouped. Computational linguistics originated with efforts in the United States in the 1950s to have computers automatically translate texts from foreign languages into English, particularly Russian scientific journals.

Some of the areas of research that are studied by computational linguistics include:

• Computer aided corpus linguistics
• Design of parsers or chunkers for natural languages
• Design of taggers like POS-taggers (part-of-speech taggers)
• Definition of specialized logics like resource logics for NLP
• Research in the relation between formal and natural languages in general
• Machine translation, e.g. by a translating computer
• Computational complexity of natural language, largely modeled on automata theory, with the application of context-sensitive grammar and linearly-bounded Turing machines.

Source: Wikipedia