计算语言学是一个跨学科领域，致力于人类语言的计算分析和产生。该领域位于语言学，计算机科学和认知科学之间，借鉴了语言学的见解和计算机科学的方法论。计算语言学在很大程度上是一门涉及实际问题的应用学科。典型的应用包括：机器翻译（从一种语言翻译成另一种语言），信息检索（在大量文本中查找相关文档或部分文档），认知建模，情感分析（例如在产品评论中），自动摘要和计算机辅助语言学习。
Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field which addresses the use of computers to process or produce human language. Linguistics contributes to this field an understanding of the special properties of language data, and also provides theories and descriptions of language structure and use. Computational linguistics is largely an applied discipline concerned with practical problems. Typical applications include: natural language processing, machine translation (translating from one language to another), speech synthesis, speech production, information retrieval (finding relevant documents or parts of documents in large collections of texts), cognitive modeling, and, in general, almost anything dealing with natural language interfaces.