o Method:
Computer Processing of
Human Language
COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS
– subfield of linguistics and computer science that is
concerned with the interactions of human language
and computers
– Includes:
o analysis of written texts and spoken
discourse
o translation of text and speech
o use of human languages for communication
between computers and people
o modeling and testing of linguistic theories
Computational phonetics and phonology
– Processing of speech
– Converting speech to text and vice versa
– Speech recognition
o analyzing speech into phones and
phonemes → producing a phonetic
transcription → converting to ordinary text
o Computers find difficulty in segmenting
speech b/c
 its original design is to detect sound
patterns of only certain
words/phrases
 it recognizes speech of only one
person
 of coarticulation - different ways to
pronounce a word/phrase
 of noise – computers do not have
the ability to zero in on the voice of
the speaker (cocktail party effect)
o Computers use statistics or pre-
programmed words/phrases to decide
– Speech synthesis
o creating electronic signals that stimulate
phones and other features of speech →
assemble into words and phrases for output
to electronic speaker
o Many have attempted to create “talking
machines” by using different materials to
imitate the mouth but now, we can produce
these sounds electronically
 Tone with same frequency as vocal
chords
 Formant synthesis – emphasizing
harmonics corresponding to the
formants required for a certain
sound OR
 Concatenative synthesis – recorded
units phones, syllables, words,
phrases, and sentences; what is
generally used today
o Computers still have a machinelike accent
– Text-to-Speech
o Computer program which converts written
texts to basic units for synthesizer
 Formant synthesizers: translates
into phonetic representation; text
to speech happens precedes
electronic conversion to sound
 Concatenative synthesis: translates
input depending on what
sounds/phones/words are joined
together
o Problems:
 Words spelled alike but read
differently (e.g. read – computer
must have structural knowledge)
 Inconsistent spelling (e.g. tough,
bough, cough, dough
Computational morphology
- Processing of word structures for the computer to
be able to understand and use the word
- Interwoven rules, exceptions, and word/morpheme
forms
- Methods:
o Computer looks for roots and affixes
o Stemming- affixes are repeatedly stripped
off
Computational syntax
- Parsing (input)
o Parser- computer program which tries to
replicate our “mental parser” – both use
grammar to assign a phrase structure to a
string of words
o 2 approaches:
 Top-down – looks at rules first then
tries to apply the sentences
  Bottom-up – it looks at the Computational Sign Language
sentence first, identifies its parts,
- Make use of a camera and visual processing
then looks for the rules
- Two purposes
o Problems
o Video dictionary
 words with different syntactic
o Enable a computer to search through ASL
categories (e.g. orange)
videos for a particular sign
 different ways to read sentences
- Generation (output)
o Assign words to the ideas or concepts
o Words must fit into phrases or sentences
which must comply with the syntax of the
language
o 2 approaches:
 Top-down- highest-lowest level
categories
 Bottom-up- words → combine
words for higher level categories
o Transition network- visualization of
grammar; uses nodes (circles) and arcs
(arrows)

Figure 1. Transition network for S -> NP VP

Computational semantics

– representation of the meaning of words and

morphemes in the computer, as well as the
meanings derived from their combinations
– Higher levels of linguistic processing
– 2 concerns:
o Produce semantic representation in the
computer
o Take semantic representation to produce
natural language output which has meaning
– Computer determines the concept it wants to
express → assembles components of meaning →
syntactic rules applied to produce grammatical
sentences

Computational pragmatics

- Pragmatics as the interaction between the real

world and the language system (e.g the switch v a
wire)
- Also used to determine meaning when two
expressions refer to the same object