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Natural Language Processing: A Historical Review

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Current Issues in Computational Linguistics: In Honour of Don Walker

Part of the book series: Linguistica Computazionale ((LICO,volume 9))

Abstract

This paper reviews natural language processing (NLP) from the late 1940’s to the present, seeking to identify its successive trends as these reflect concerns with different problems or the pursuit of different approaches to solving these problems and building systems as wholes. The review distinguishes four phases in the history of NLP, characterised respectively by an emphasis on machine translation, by the influence of artificial intelligence, by the adoption of a logico-grammatical style, and by an attack on massive language data. The account considers the significant and salient work in each phase, and concludes with an assessment of where we stand after more than forty years of effort in the field.

The material in the earlier part of this paper is taken from my article “Natural language processing: an overview”, in W. Bright (ed.) International encyclopedia of linguistics, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, Vol. 3, 53–59.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK

    Karen Sparck Jones

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  1. Karen Sparck Jones
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Antonio Zampolli Nicoletta Calzolari Martha Palmer

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© 1994 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Jones, K.S. (1994). Natural Language Processing: A Historical Review. In: Zampolli, A., Calzolari, N., Palmer, M. (eds) Current Issues in Computational Linguistics: In Honour of Don Walker. Linguistica Computazionale, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-35958-8_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-35958-8_1

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-0-7923-2998-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-585-35958-8

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