title: Which language or tools to learn for natural language processing?
body: <p>I am French, and am a former Certified Network Security Administrator.
  I went back to university 3 years ago to achieve a Bachelor's degree in linguistics, and I am now going to enroll in a Masters Degree in Computer Science applied to Linguistics, with the objective of eventually trying to go through a Doctorate (but I'm not there yet :-) ).</p>
  
  <p>The course will focus on speech recognition, automatic language translation, statistical analysis of texts, speech encoding and decoding, and information abstratction from textual sources.
  The professors will let us use any computer language we want to use to code the algorithms and programs we will develop during the curriculum.</p>
  
  <p>I used to develop web apps as a side gig for about 3-4 years and I am proficient in Javascript as I wrote software that used node.js at the server end and the browser at the client. I also have some familiarity with postgresql.</p>
  
  <p>My current style of coding (if we can call that a style) is mainly procedural and I use object prototyping as my main way to create/manage objects in my code. I don't have much experience with object oriented language that use the concept of classes to manage the objects. Therefore I am pretty confident my current coding skills are definitely lacking in regards to what is required for me to write efficient code to deal with that stuff.</p>
  
  <p>So my question is this : what would be the best computer language for me to learn in order to be effective in writing algorithms and data structure suited for the above mentionned linguistic areas?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance for your enlightened answers.</p>
  
  <p>Sat Cit Ananda.</p>