Language and speech technology can roughly be divided into two parts: one working with written characters, and another dealing with speech as an acoustic phenomenon. Computational language technology is mostly concerned with the first of these, while speech technology takes the second. The two of course overlap in certain points, as for example in the text-based marking of accents with linguistic analysis, for the purposes of speech synthesis.

Some more important fields of research:
▪ speech recognition and speech synthesis
▪ computer-enhanced corpus linguistics
▪ processing and grouping of natural language data (e.g. syntactic or morphological analysis, establishing roots, tokenization)
▪ labeling applications (e.g. part-of-speech labeling, verb argument structure applications)
▪ automated distribution of word stress in written text, on the sentence level
▪ application of logical and semantic knowledge
▪ general examination of the connection of natural and formal languages
▪ machine translation, translation support
▪ spell-checking and style-checking
▪ text summaries
▪ speech acoustics