** First Phase - Machine Translation Phase : 1940-1960**
The research on NLP started in early 1950s after Booth & Richens’ investigation and Weaver’s memorandum on machine translation in 1949.
1954 was the year when a limited experiment on automatic translation from Russian to English demonstrated in the Georgetown-IBM experiment.
In the same year, the publication of the journal MT (Machine Translation) started.
The first international conference on Machine Translation (MT) was held in 1952 and second was held in 1956.
In 1961, the work presented in Teddington International Conference on Machine Translation of Languages and Applied Language analysis was the high point of this phase.
Second Phase - AI Influenced Phase – 1960-1970
In early 1961, the work began on the problems of addressing and constructing data or knowledge base. This work was influenced by AI.
In the same year, a BASEBALL question-answering system was also developed. The input to this system was restricted and the language processing involved was a simple one.
A much advanced system was described in Minsky (1968). This system, when compared to the BASEBALL question-answering system, was recognized and provided for the need of inference on the knowledge base in interpreting and responding to language input
Third Phase - Grammatico-logical Phase – 1970-1980
The grammatico-logical approach, towards the end of decade, helped us with powerful general-purpose sentence processors like SRI’s Core Language Engine and Discourse Representation Theory, which offered a means of tackling more extended discourse.
In this phase we got some practical resources & tools like parsers, e.g. Alvey Natural Language Tools along with more operational and commercial systems, e.g. for database query.
The work on lexicon in 1980s also pointed in the direction of grammatico-logical approach.
Fourth Phase - Lexical & Corpus Phase – 1990
There was a revolution in natural language processing in this decade with the introduction of machine learning algorithms for language processing.
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