language analysis that makes use of electronic digital computers. Computational analysis is most frequently applied to the handling of basic language data—e.g., making concordances and counting frequencies of sounds, words, and word elements—although numerous other types of linguistic analysis can be performed by computers.

The period of greatest interest in computational linguistics was from about 1955 to 1965, when researchers undertook projects that would lead to computerized or mechanical translation involving grammatical and semantic analysis of sentences. Support for research in mechanical translation diminished after it became apparent that the problem of producing automatic translations of high quality was far more difficult than it had been thought to be. Techniques developed in computational linguistics have been used in other fields; e.g., the study of style in literature often uses frequency counts of language elements, and information retrieval usually makes use of automated grammatical analysis.