The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics

NNatural Language Processing and Language Learning

DETMAR MEURERS

As a relatively young field of research and development started by work on cryptanalysis and machine translation around 50 years ago, natural language processing (NLP) is concerned with the automated processing of human language. It addresses the analysis and generation of written and spoken language, although speech processing is often regarded as a separate subfield. NLP emphasizes processing and applications and as such can be seen as the applied side of computational linguistics, the interdisciplinary field of research concerned with formal analysis and modeling of language and its applications at the intersection of linguistics, computer science, and psychology. In terms of the language aspects dealt with in NLP, traditionally lexical, morphological, and syntactic aspects of language were the center of attention, but aspects of meaning, discourse, and the relation to the extralinguistic context have become increasingly prominent in the last decade. A good introduction and overview of the field is provided in Jurafsky and Martin (2009).

This entry explores the relevance and uses of NLP for language learning, focusing on written language. (For a recent overview of technology targeting pronunciation, see Pennington & Rogerson‐Revell, 2019, chap. 5.) The entry focuses on showing the relevance, characterizing the techniques, and delineating the uses of NLP for language learning. More historical background and ...