An Attempt to Chart the History of NLP in 5 Papers: Part I
Natural language processing (NLP) exists as a sort of intermediate space between computer science and linguistics, taking more from either discipline as fit for the task at hand. With this breadth in mind, NLP ends up serving as an umbrella that encompasses everything from named entity recognition to machine translation. Such a broad umbrella creates applications that perform tasks as varied as sentiment analysis, question answering, and coreference resolution — but this also fosters difficulty in precisely defining the term “natural language processing.”
The difficulty associated with pinning down a neat and tidy description for NLP extends to any attempt to outline a concise history of the field. Nonetheless, this two-part article series roughly aims to do that.
Drawing largely from a timeline laid out by Karen Sparck Jones in “Natural Language Processing: A Historical Review” (2001), this series showcases a total of five exemplary research papers to articulate a unifying foundation for NLP and depict how the earlier roots of the field extend into later and contemporary research.
