It has long been an interest of computer scientists and users of computers to be able to use computers to translate from natural language to natural language. Would it not be wonderful to have a computer that could automatically translate all of the world's languages into English and vice versa? Then a person knowing just English would be able to interact with the speakers of other languages with no difficulty at all. To the extent that lack of understanding of languages is a major barrier to cultural amity, such an advance in the use of computers would have widespread ramifications not only for technology, but also for human society and culture.

Computational Linguistics, also sometimes known as Natural Language Processing (NLP), is the field that was created to make this fantasy a reality. This is a very involved subject lying at the intersections of computer science...