... tool; however, when these machine translation systems became active, their performance was far under the expectation. Thus, computational linguistics, the science of perfecting these and other natural language processing systems, was born (Ball). The first moderately accurate machine translation program, SYSTRAN, became operational in the mid-sixties and is still a leader in the technology today (University of Zürich). Recently, computational linguists have focused less on machine translation, and more on creating computer systems able to recognize and generate human speech (Jurafsky and Martin iii). Computational linguists are piloting ahead new technologies in building computer systems with a knowledge of human speech (Columbia University). Linguists use two main approaches to reaching this goal: simulation and emulation. What this basically means is that computer linguists work by actually creating small models of the brain's thinking, which can in turn generate and recognize language, and by creating programs that imitate certain parts of ...

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