FOR WHAT PURPOSES do we need to develop computational linguistics? What practical results does it provide for society? Before we start discus-sing the methods and techniques of computational linguistics, it is worthwhile giving a review of some existing practical results, i.e., applications, or products, of this discipline. We consider such applications in a very broad sense, including in this category all known tasks of word processing, as well as those of text processing, text generation, dialogue in a natural language, and language understanding.
Some of these applications already provide the user with satisfactory solutions for their tasks, especially for English, while other tasks and languages have been under continuous research in recent decades.
Of course, some extrapolations of the current trends could give completely new types of systems and new solutions to the current problems, but this is out of scope of this book.