Computational Linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with formalized models of natural language and implementations of these models that allow for efficient processing of text or speech. The field is changing rapidly, mainly as a result of the explosion of electronically available data and the development of large-scale, data-driven methods. While the field brings about new ways of confronting descriptive and theoretical linguistics with empirical evidence, it is also pulled by its many applications, such as machine translation, information retrieval and dialogue systems.
