Nowadays, artificial intelligence and all that is derived from it, has made possible a great change in companies, since it facilitates their way of operating in more effective and simple ways.
One of the subset techniques of artificial intelligence, known as Natural language processing (NLP), has revolutionized the last few years. It is used to bridge the communication gap between computer and human.
What is PLN?
PLN is a branch of artificial intelligence that helps computers understand, interpret and manipulate human language.
Its first steps
It all started with the idea of creating a translation machine (TM), which was born during the Second World War, in the 1940s. The original idea was to convert one language to another, but using the brains of computers, however, after that came the idea of converting human language into computer language and vice versa.
Similarly, the original language was English and Russian. But the use of other languages such as Chinese emerged in the early period of the 1960s.
Later, there came a dark period for MT/NLP during 1966. This was supported by a report of ALPAC (Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee), according to which MT/NLP almost died because research in this area did not have the pace at that time.
However, this condition improved again in the 1980s when the MT/PNL-related product began to deliver some results to customers. After reaching an almost dying state in the 1960s, PLN/MT gained a new life when the idea and need for Artificial Intelligence emerged.
In the 1980s, the area of computational grammar became a very active research field that was linked to the science of reasoning for meaning and the consideration of user beliefs and intentions.
In the period of the 1990s, the pace of PLN/MT growth increased. Grammars, tools and practical resources related to this technique became available for a wide range of industries.
Fun fact!
The history of PLN cannot be considered complete without mention of ELIZA, a chatbot program that was developed between 1964 and 1966 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It was created by Joseph Weizenbaum.
This was a program that was based on a script called DOCTOR that was arranged for the Rogerian psychotherapist and used rules to answer user questions that had a psychometric basis. It was one of the chatbots that were capable of taking the Turing test at the time.
Incredible, right? We will tell you more about NLP in the next article! Stay tuned