Abstract
In conclusion, it is worthwhile to take up some theoretical issues that result from reading the history of Natural Language Processing, as the history of recent past. The appearance of machine translation as an event in the context of war has hastened the process of automation without that process being a continuation of a specific linguistic or intellectual tradition. The point of view I have adopted, that is, to study the modes of integration of machine translation, computational linguistics, information theory and information retrieval into linguistics, raises the issue of the relationship between horizon of retrospection and tradition; between institutional history and history of linguistic ideas; and the stakes of a unique periodisation for such a short history; finally, it would be worth determining whether we should speak of a revolution or of a new mode of historicity.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
In this case, institutional history puts forward the interaction of the sociological component with the practical component (the development of machine translation systems) which should be analysed first before the theoretical component (see the model of sciences proposed by Auroux 1987).
- 3.
For a criticism of such a model, see Auroux (1987).
- 4.
“Sometimes called the fallacy of nunc pro tunc, it (the fallacy of presentism) is the mistaken idea that the proper way to do history is to prune away the dead branches of the past, and to preserve the green buds and twigs which have grown into the dark forest of our contemporary world” (Fischer 1970, p.136).
- 5.
Such parallels have been drawn between universal languages schemes of the seventeenth century in Great Britain (Cram 1985) and the revival of interest they aroused as machine translation methods.
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Alternation of short cycles, the ephemeral nature of research and its damaging effects on knowledge accumulation had been pointed out by some researchers as early as the 1990s (see Victorri 1995).
- 7.
On the 23rd of June 2009, during the ceremony celebrating the 50th anniversary of ATALA, a German NLP representative claimed that the current dominant trend in MT was based on statistical methods, while at the same time and at the same place, the American representative claimed that it was rule-based methods which were on the rise, without any of them referring to the other.
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Léon, J. (2021). General Conclusion. In: Automating Linguistics. History of Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70642-5_11
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