Evolutionary Algorithms in Natural Language Processing

Natural language processing grapples with an ever-changing and moving target. The focus of study, natural language, is natural because it changes, interacts and evolves in various directions. The bio-inspired computational methods described as evolutionary computation create computational models that evolve a population of individuals to find a solution to a given problem. This paper investigates how evolutionary computation has been employed in natural language processing, ranging from efforts to induce grammars to models of language development through parameter optimization and search.