History of Natural Language Processing

The history of Natural Language Processing can be traced back to 17th century when philosophers such as Leibniz and Descartes put forward proposals for codes to relate words between languages. Although these proposals only remained theoretical back then, they laid the ground for the development of an actual machine. The first patents for translating machine was applied in the mid-1930s by Georges Artsrouni's proposal. From that time, machine translation has undergone several changes. Below are some important changes that took place.

• 1950: Alan Turing in his article, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" proposed the Turing test as a criterion of intelligence. The Turing test questioned the ability for machines to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to that of humans.
• 1957: The Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures helped revolutionized Linguistics with universal grammar.
• 1969: Roger Schank introduced a model that was partially influenced by the work of Sydnel lamb which was used extensively by Schank's students at Yale University.
• 1970: William A. Woods introduced the augmented transition network (ATN) to represent natural language input. Many programmers also began writing conceptual ontologies which structured real-world information into computer-understandable data in the 1970s.
• 1980: A revolution in NLP began in the 1980s with the introduction of machine learning algorithms for language processing. This was because of the steady increase in computational power resulting from Moore's Law and the gradual lessening of the dominance of Chomskyan theories of linguistics, whose theoretical underpinnings discouraged the sort of corpus linguistics that underlies the machine-learning approach to language processing.
• 2006: Watson, a question-answering computer system capable of answering questions posed in Natural language was developed in IMB's DeepQA project by a research team which was led by Principal Investigator David Ferrucci.