History of NLP
Let’s try and get a better appreciation of how far NLP technology has come. It’s mind-boggling to know that natural language processing, and AI in general, have existed just within the span of one generation. Natural language processing was a major objective from the very start, in the form of efforts at machine translation (MT), but NLP would grow to have applications beyond it.
No discussion of the NLP’s history would be complete without machine translation. With the advent of computers, fully automated MT was one of the first goals toward which researchers drove their efforts. This is why the history of NLP and the history of machine translation have significant overlap.
Early efforts at machine translation were based on bolivia mobile database principles developed in cryptography and cryptanalysis used during World War II. That is, language was considered a kind of code to be decoded in a different language. While much of this earlier thinking has been discarded, some cryptanalytical elements do remain relevant in work that is done today.
The Turing Test
In 1950, English mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing developed a now-famous test for determining whether a machine is capable of exhibiting true intelligence.
The Turing test, as it was originally conceived, would determine the ability of an AI machine to converse with humans. It involved an evaluator, a human partner, and the machine, each separated so they can’t see each other. The evaluator would pose some complex questions and converse with both parties. This would be done through text, to avoid influencing the outcome due to differences in speech and voice.
If the evaluator is unable to tell the difference between the human and the machine, then the machine would be considered to have passed the test.