At the interface of computational linguistics and statistics

Abstract

Computational linguistics encompasses a broad range of ideas and research areas, and only a brief introduction is possible here. We chose to include areas in computational linguistics where statisticians can contribute, hoping to provide inspiration to the reader. We describe three main aspects of this discipline—formal languages, information retrieval, and machine learning. These support the overarching goal, which is the representation and analysis of meaning from unstructured text. We then provide an example where text analysis has been applied to unstructured text fields in survey records and conclude with some applications and computational resources. WIREs Comput Stat 2015, 7:258–274. doi: 10.1002/wics.1353This article is categorized under: Applications of Computational Statistics > Computational Linguistics Software for Computational Statistics > Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems