There are so many synonymous terms floating around in the technical community to confuse the likes of many in field as well. Even terms like computational intelligence, soft computing, and artificial intelligence can be such grey areas beyond the fields of research. But, within applied work in business sectors no one bothers to wonder one way or the other as long as the method is sound and logically transpires to a workable solution. Natural language processing and computational linguistics are also such grey areas and in business often seen as synonymous to what they actually do. There is hardly much of a difference other than the way they approach certain linguistic problems. Perhaps, computational linguistics is more focused towards understanding the language through the use of computational tools. Maybe, even creating such computational tools in the process. It certainly involves building and analyzing textual corpus. However, natural language processing takes the linguistic approach to tools a step further by applying such tools to providing a practical solution to a problem of deriving meaning when given a set of input and output variables where such computational models can be applied in context. But, in case for many, these fields are quite overlapping as far as roles are concerned.
