Language analysis that makes use of electronic digital computers. Computational analysis is most frequently applied to the handling of basic language data—e.g., making concordances and counting frequencies of sounds, words, and word elements—although numerous other types of linguistic analysis can be performed by computers.

The period of greatest interest in computational linguistics was from about 1955 to 1965, when researchers undertook projects that would lead to computerized or mechanical translation involving grammatical and semantic analysis of sentences. Support for research in mechanical translation diminished after it became apparent that the problem of producing automatic translations of high quality was far more difficult than it had been thought to be. Techniques developed in computational linguistics have been used in other fields; e.g., the study of style in literature often uses frequency counts of language elements, and information retrieval usually makes use of automated grammatical analysis.

By computational linguistics is meant no more than the use of electronic digital computers in linguistic research. At a theoretically trivial level, computers are employed to scan texts and to produce, more rapidly and more reliably than was possible in the past, such valuable aids to linguistic and stylistic research as word lists, frequency counts, and concordances. Theoretically more interesting, though much more difficult, is the automatic grammatical analysis of texts by computer. Considerable progress was made in this area by research groups working on machine translation and information retrieval in the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, France, and a few other countries in the decade between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s. But much of the original impetus for this work disappeared, for a time at least, in part because of the realization that the theoretical problems involved in machine translation are much more difficult than they were at first thought to be and in part as a consequence of a loss of interest among linguists in the development of discovery procedures. Whether automatic syntactic analysis and fully automatic high-quality machine translation are even feasible in principle remains a controversial question.

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