Human Language Technology is a developing interdisciplinary field that encompasses most subdisciplines of linguistics, as well as computational linguistics, natural language processing, computer science, artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, mathematics, and statistics.

Anywhere language comes in contact with information technology, or where humans need to interact with computers, language needs to be organized so that it can be handled and processed by computational means. This often requires broad knowledge not only about linguistics and how languages work, but also about computer science and related fields.

Well-known topics in human language technology include web search engine technology (an instance of information retrieval), speech recognition (computer dictation), speech synthesis (computer-generated speech), optical character recognition (OCR), machine translation, electronic dictionaries, spell checking, grammar checking, word processing, computer typesetting, computer-assisted language teaching, automatic captioning on TV - in short, any and all tasks where human language and information technology meet.