History
The
field of natural language processing began in the 1940s, after World
War II. At this time, people recognized the importance of translation
from one language to another and hoped to create a machine that
could do this sort of translation automatically. However, the task
was obviously not as easy as people first imagined. By 1958, some
researchers were identifying significant issues in the development
of NLP. One of these researchers was Noam Chomsky, who found it
troubling that models of language recognized sentences that were
nonsense but grammatically correct as equally irrelevant as sentences
that were nonsense and not grammatically correct. Chomsky found
it problematic that the sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep
furiously” was classified as improbable to the same extent
that “Furiously sleep ideas green colorless”; any speaker
of English can recognize the former as grammatically correct and
the latter as incorrect, and Chomsky felt the same should be expected
of machine models.
Around
the same time in history, from 1957-1970, researchers split into
two divisions concerning NLP: symbolic and stochastic. Symbolic,
or rule-based, researchers focused on formal languages and generating
syntax; this group consisted of many linguists and computer scientists
who considered this branch the beginning of artificial intelligence
research. Stochastic researchers were more interested in statistical
and probabilistic methods of NLP, working on problems of optical
character recognition and pattern recognition between texts.
After
1970, researchers split even further, embracing new areas of NLP
as more technology and knowledge became available. One new area
was logic-based paradigms, languages that focused on encoding rules
and language in mathematical logics. This area of NLP research later
contributed to the development of the programming language Prolog.
Natural language understanding was another area of NLP that was
particularly influenced by SHRDLU, Professor Terry Winograd’s
doctoral thesis. This program placed a computer in a world of blocks,
enabling it to manipulate and answer questions about the blocks
according to natural language instructions from the user. The amazing
part of this system was its capability to learn and understand with
amazing accuracy, something only currently possible in extremely
limited domains (e.g., the block world). The following text was
generated in a demonstration of SHDRLU:
Computer: OK.
(does it)
Person: PUT THE LITTLEST PYRAMID ON TOP OF IT.
Computer: OK. (does it)
Person: DOES THE SHORTEST THING THE TALLEST PYRAMID'S SUPPORT
SUPPORTS SUPPORT ANYTHING GREEN?
Computer: YES, THE GREEN PYRAMID.
Person: WHAT COLOR IS IT?
Computer: BY "IT", I ASSUME YOU MEAN THE SHORTEST THING
THE TALLEST PYRAMID'S SUPPORT SUPPORTS.
Computer: RED
The
computer is clearly able to resolve relationships between objects
and understand certain ambiguities. A fourth area of NLP that came
into existence after 1970 is discourse modeling. This area examines
interchanges between people and computers, working out such ideas
as the need to change “you” in a speaker’s question
to “me” in the computer’s answer.
From
1983 to 1993, researchers became more united in focusing on empiricism
and probabilistic models. Researchers were able to test certain
arguments by Chomsky and others from the 1950s and 60s, discovering
that many arguments that were convincing in text were not empirically
accurate. Thus, by 1993, probabilistic and statistical methods of
handling natural language processing were the most common types
of models. In the last decade, NLP has also become more focused
on information extraction and generation due to the vast amounts
of information scattered across the Internet. Additionally, personal
computers are now everywhere, and thus consumer level applications
of NLP are much more common and an impetus for further research.
|