Role of Linguistics in Technology

WHAT HAS LINGUISTICS got to do with technology, one may wonder. The fact is, there is a deep connection between the two. From the 1930s to today, computing technology has undergone dramatic changes.

The earliest input devices were punch tapes or patch cables and switches that instructed machines to perform certain computations. Then came the keyboard and mouse, feature phones and the latest touch sensitive screens. While the keyboard and mouse remain the primary input devices, increasingly, we are able to communicate with machines via speech and gestures.

This transformation is driven by the field of linguistics. Modern day linguists are finding interesting parallels in the works of Panini, a Sanskrit grammarian believed to have lived during the 5th or 6th century BC, and today's NLP (Natural Language Processing) algorithms. According to Prof. Furio Honsell, "huge amounts of ideas are buried in his treatise Astadhyayi. They can be used for formal language processing in computer sciences".

Most of us are now comfortable using Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana, Bixby and similar other voice assistants. We are also accustomed to IVR (Interactive Voice Response) telephony, wherein an automated response greets us when we call customer care numbers of various companies and we follow the directions given to get our query or complaint resolved.

Computational linguistics (CL) is under the hood in these interactions between humans and machines. It is the driving force in the development of instant machine translators, text-to-speech converters, search engines, etc. to name a few. A subset of CL, NLP enables computers to understand human languages. Both these terms are, more often than not, used synonymously. However, there is a distinction in that CL focuses on the language aspect while NLP on its application to get tasks done.