Re: "Work on natural language processing"
"Work on natural language processing has been going on since the '80s and it's nice to see it coming near fruition."
I think you can trace it back to the 1950s. A small sample of papers from that period.
W. A. Clark and B. G. Farley, “Generalization of Pattern Recognition in a Self-Organizing System,” in Proceeedings of the 1955 Western Joint Computer Conference, Los Angeles, California, 1955, pp. 86–91.
Datamation, “Sarnoff foresees Voice-Controlled Systems,” Datamation, vol. 3, no. 7, p. 23, Oct. 1957.
D. L. Johnson, “The Role of the Digital Computer in Mechanical Translation of Languages,” in Proceedings of the May 6-8, 1958, Western Joint Computer Conference: Contrasts in Computers, Los Angeles, Calif., 1958, pp. 161–165.
W. W. Bledsoe and I. Browning, “Pattern Recognition and Reading by Machine,” in Papers Presented at the December 1-3, 1959, Eastern Joint IRE-AIEE-ACM Computer Conference, 1959, pp. 225–232. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/1460299.1460326
It was certainly well and truly on the radar and chess playing programs were being produced on the hardware of the day.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
