1980s marked a shift towards probabilistic statistical models. Moore’s law allowed for complex computations at scale. Major industry players (IBM etc.) successfully adopted large statistical models. A steady increase of computational power helped the evolution of machine learning algorithms. The new era marked the dominance of statistical models and saw major improvements in text and…
This is another detour into NLP history. If you haven’t, go check the first part talking about the pioneers of modern linguistics. In the middle of 1960s Joseph Weizenbaum came up with program that appeared to pass Turing’s test. Weizenbaum built a conversation simulator, known as ELIZA, using a fairly straightforward approach. The “chatbot” would…
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…