Foundations of Modern Linguistics

This post looks at early stages in the history of natural language processing.

Early Approach to Machine Translation

First documented attempts for interlingual translation date back to the 17th century. Descartes and Leibniz proposed codes which would relate words between languages. Attempts to arrive at a universal language eventually lead to the birth of Esperanto in the 18th century.

Foundation of Modern Linguistics

The beginning of the 20th century saw the first serious attempts to understand the structure of human languages. Work of a thought leader professor Ferdinand de Saussure resulted into a compilation called Course in General Linguistics. The book is seen as a foundation of Structural Linguistics, a trend that persisted in Europe and US until 1950’s.

What if Machines acted like Humans?

I propose to consider the question, “Can machines think?”

Alan Turing: Computing Machinery and Intelligence, The Imitation Game

In his seminal paper from 1950 Alan Turing sets a new challenge, an imitation game. His hypothesis that a machine could exhibit human-like behaviour has been objected by many. Alan Turing’s theory started a new trend in the field of artificial intelligence. Hodgin-Huxley experiment which showed that neurons in a brain form an electrical network. This observation further reinforced by the Hodgin-Huxley experiment which showed that neurons in a brain form an electrical network. The whole concept of machines acting like humans tied well into the observations made by Noam Chomsky. In his book Syntactic Structures, published in 1957, Chomsky presents a methodical approach to transforming a sentence in any human language into a format that can be processed by a computer.

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