Natural language is an integral part of our lives. Language serves as the primary vehicle by which people communicate and record information. It has the potential for expressing an enormous range of ideas, and for conveying complex thoughts succinctly. Because it is so integral to our lives, however, we usually take its powers and influence for granted.

The aim of computational linguistics is, in a sense, to capture this power. By understanding language processes in procedural terms, we can give computer systems the ability to generate and interpret natural language. This would make it possible for computers to perform linguistic tasks (such as translation), process textual data (books, journals, newspapers), and make it much easier for people to access computer-stored data. A well-developed ability to handle language would have a profound impact on how computers are used.

The potential for natural language processing was recognized quite early in the development of computers, and work in computational linguistics – primarily for machine translation – began in the 1950s at a number of research centers. The rapid growth in the field, however, has taken place mostly since the late 1970s. A 1983 survey by the Association for Computational Linguistics (Evens and Karttunen 1983) listed 85 universities granting degrees in computational linguistics. A 1982 survey by the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (Kaplan 1982) listed 59 university and research centers with projects in computational linguistics, and the number continues to grow.