A State of the art in Computational Linguistics

1. The position of Computational Linguistics Computational Linguistics has a long history, dating back to the Fifties, during which it developed a whole set of computational models and implementations, theories, methodologies and applications. It is difficult to give a sensible account of its present state without going back a little to the main steps through which this discipline evolved towards its present state. roots with Computational Linguistics; parsing, which is central for the design of compilers for programming languages (Aho and Ullmann 1977: 6), is also the building block of any natural language processing engine, and both are the realizations of the chomskian theory of formal languages (Chomsky 1957). The same theory, together with the corresponding computational model, has given a contribution to the general hypothesis of Artificial Intelligence, that human behaviours usually judged intelligent could be simulated in a computer in a principled way. Oversimplifying,