LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Computational Linguistics as a Curriculum for
Engineering Students in India

G. Bhuvaneswari, Ph. D. and K. P. Soman, Ph.D.

Abstract

NLP and Machine Translation tools are upcoming areas of study in the field of Computational Linguistics. The development of Language technology and its growth leads to the need for the detailed study of computational aspect of Language and especially for those who mastered the field of Technology. This paper tends to create a basic reference tools for those students and researchers who are interested in Computational Linguistics and also give some basic idea of every tool used to develop such software tools.

Introduction

Computational Linguistics is an Interdisciplinary of Linguistics. The very term infer that it is a bridge for Language and Technology while these two fields in the earlier stage were defined as different areas of study. Computational Linguistics is the advanced step for using computers in the Language field. While Language is a form of communication that reaches even the ordinary people, computers were meant only for those who dealt with technology and sciences. Bridging these two is a great challenging task which can be studied under Computational Linguistics and hence it is necessary to include Computational Linguistics as a Special and Independent subject for Engineering graduates.

Though Computational Linguistics sounds more of to be a practical subject, it also has theoretical components. Theoretical Linguistics deals with issues involved in Theoretical Linguistics and Cognitive science. Many Theories are to be dealt in order to understand and generate Natural Language and this is handled by the knowledge of Theoretical Linguistics. Various theories done by researchers and pioneers in the field of Computational Linguistics come under Theoretical Issues. Further improvement in this field can be undertaken based on the issues involved in Theoretical Linguistics.

Applied Linguistics is more of practical side of Computational Linguistics. It involves the practical outcome of modeling human language use. Developing tools, techniques and methodology to develop such tools and techniques are handled in Applied Linguistics. The purpose of developing these tools are to create software products that acts more interactive with human knowledge and in turn attain some knowledge of human language. That does not mean that Computers either learn human language or replaces the human brain. It aims actually at training computers to understand the logic and the mathematical ability that deals with the language generation which is also knows as Machine Learning.

Though Language is a set of rules, it is not always easy to make a Machine to understand all set of rules since it needs to understand human logic which is very complicated. This becomes a great challenge in this field.

Although we use language for communication in everyday life, still it remains a query that how people acquire language. Some language acquisition researchers believe that, language acquisition is based primarily on general learning mechanisms. Humans have the understanding of complex mechanisms which keeps the language growing. The process of making the computer learn such mechanisms help us to learn better about the language acquisition theory by humans and also to learn the concealed characteristics of human language. This characteristics may in turn be common to other set of languages also which come under same family of languages.

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