A human language. For example, English, French, and Chinese are natural languages. Computer languages, such as FORTRAN and C, are not.
Probably the single most challenging problem in computer science is to develop computers that can understand natural languages. So far, the complete solution to this problem has proved elusive, although a great deal of progress has been made. Fourth-generation languages are the programming languages closest to natural languages.
Center for Machine Translation research site Contains information on the research activities and reports from the Center for Machine Translation/Language Technologies Institute located in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.
Human Language Technology Survey Contains links to the table of contents for the "Human Language Technology Survey " project. Sections include: spoken and written language input, language analysis and understanding, spoken output technologies, document processing, and language resources.
