A brief, general-audience overview of the history of natural language processing, focusing on data-driven approaches. Topics include "Ambiguity and language analysis", "Firth things first", "A 'C' change", and "The empiricists strike back".
@incollection{Lee:04a, author = {Lillian Lee}, title = {"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that": Linguistics, Statistics, and Natural Language Processing circa 2001}, year = {2004}, pages = {111--118}, booktitle = {Computer Science: Reflections on the Field, Reflections from the Field (Report of the National Academies' study on the Fundamentals of Computer Science)} }
This paper is based upon work supported in part by the National Science Foundation under ITR/IM grant IIS-0081334 and a Sloan Research Fellowship. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed above are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the Sloan Foundation.