# Machines now read your text before any person does.

Canonical: https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/computational-linguistics/
Author: Johannes Faupel

On this page

**What it is**
Computational linguistics is the machinery that turns language into something a system can compute.

**The problem until now**
Words on a page were treated as keywords, so the meaning a machine extracts stayed out of view.

**What you can do from here**
You can write sentences a parser, an extractor and a model can use without changing what you mean.

![Computational linguistics: a sentence is parsed into structure, structure yields facts, facts link to entities](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/images/maps/named-entity-recognition-computational-linguistics.svg?v=1790368037)
*Computational linguistics: How the parts depend on each other.*

## Try this first
<https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/computational-linguistics/#try-this-first>

Three tests, about ten minutes. They show what a machine extracts from your sentences.

Tests on this page you have run: 0 of 3. The count stays in this browser only.

Test: Computational linguistics

- Take one paragraph of your page and write its facts as subject, relation, value.
- Put it aside for a moment.
- Think: how many did you have to guess?
Facts a machine can pull out, beside facts hidden in style.

Test

- Read the first word of every paragraph on your page.
- Put it aside for a moment.
- Think: how many begin with it, they or this?
Passages that lose their subject when lifted out.

Test

- Search your company name together with your city on Google.
- Note what you got, before you open anything else.
- Think: did a different company appear under the same name?
Whether a system can tell you from a namesake.

Semantic search needs more than semantic splitters. What a system extracts from your page is what your page said, as far as anyone downstream is concerned.

## Topics in this field
<https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/computational-linguistics/#topics-in-this-field>

[Extractive summarization](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/computational-linguistics/extractive-summarization/): The summary is now the article for most of the audience.

[Keyphrase extraction](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/computational-linguistics/keyphrase-extraction/): If your real subject is named once, it is not your subject as far as the system is concerned.

[Semantic search](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/computational-linguistics/semantic-search/): The engine got better at knowing what you meant.

[Named entity recognition](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/computational-linguistics/named-entity-recognition/): Being an entity is a prerequisite for being understood.

[Topic modeling](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/computational-linguistics/topic-modeling/): What a topic model can show about a collection of texts, and where its silence begins.

[Question answering](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/computational-linguistics/question-answering/): A confident single answer is the format.

[Word sense disambiguation](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/computational-linguistics/word-sense-disambiguation/): Your page competes in whichever meaning the system assigned to it.

[Sentiment analysis](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/computational-linguistics/sentiment-analysis/): A dashboard of positive and negative tells you the weather, not the cause.

These pages state what each technique does and what follows from it for the person who wrote the text.

![A dependency parse tree of one sentence about programmatic SEO](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/images/programmatic-seo-meaning.webp?v=1696836742)
*One sentence, taken apart by a parser. This is the level at which your text is actually read.*

## The other fields
<https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/computational-linguistics/#the-other-fields>

- [Digital marketing](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/digital-marketing/)
- [Information retrieval](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/information-retrieval/)
- [Human-computer interaction](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/human-computer-interaction/)
- [Social epistemology](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/social-epistemology/)

## Everything in this field, on one screen

Each point is a page of computational linguistics. Drag, zoom, and click a point to open that page. The whole site is drawn on the [knowledge graph](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/knowledgegraph/).

[See this field inside the whole site →](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/knowledgegraph/)