THROUGHOUT THE PREVIOUS CHAPTERS, you have learned, on the one hand, that for many computer applications, detailed linguistic knowledge is necessary and, on the other hand, that natural language has a sophisticated structure, which is not easy to represent.
Thus, any application needs a description of language, i.e., the knowledge about its main properties. Such knowledge is organized in a model of language. The structure and degree of detail depend on the application’s needs.
Our objectives now are to discuss the problem of modeling in computational linguistics. We observe the modeling in general, describe shortly the neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic models, and then discuss the functional models of natural language, with a special emphasis on common features of these models.