Applied linguistic systems are now widely used in business and scientific domains for many purposes. Some of the most important ones among them are the following:
· Text preparation, or text editing, in a broad sense, particularly including the tasks listed below:
– Automatic hyphenation of words in natural language texts,
– Spell checking, i.e., detection and correction of typographic and spelling errors,
– Grammar checking, i. e., detection and correction of grammatical errors,
– Style checking, i. e. detection and correction of stylistic errors,
– Referencing specific words, word combinations, and semantic links between them;
· Information retrieval in scientific, technical, and business document databases;
· Automatic translation from one natural language to another;
· Natural language interfaces to databases and other systems;
· Extraction of factual data from business or scientific texts;
· Text generation from pictures and formal specifications;
· Natural language understanding;
· Optical character recognition, speech recognition, etc.
For the purposes of this book, we will give here only a short sketch of each application. Later, some of these topics, with more deep explanations, can be touched upon once more.