Stories in the Development of Natural Language Processing

At the beginning of the 20th century, natural language processing entered people’s field of vision in the form of “shared linguistics”; in the 1950s, natural language processing began to develop rapidly with the Turing test boom; until the 1970s, the development of natural language processing stagnated When it stopped, it began to enter a low period; after people reflected on the past research in the 1980s, natural language processing research gradually recovered; in the 1990s, the speed and storage of computers increased significantly, which improved the material basis for natural language processing.

01 The budding period of natural language processing

At the beginning of the 20th century, at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, a linguistics professor named Ferdinand de Saussure invented a way to describe language as a “system”. Professor Saussure believes that meaning is created in the relationship and difference within the language and between the parts of the language. “In a word, what is important is not the sound itself, but the sound that distinguishes the word from all other words. Differences, because it is these differences that have meaning.” He proposed that “meaning” arises from the relationship and contrast between languages, and the shared language system makes…