History of NLP : Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the fascinating field of artificial intelligence that empowers machines to understand, interpret, and generate human language. From simple rule-based translations to today's intelligent chatbots and large language models, NLP has come a long way. This blog takes you through the rich history of NLP — from its roots in linguistics to the cutting-edge neural networks driving modern applications. 1. The Origins: 1950s–1960s The foundation of NLP was laid during the 1950s, primarily driven by the field of linguistics and early computational theories. In 1950, Alan Turing proposed the famous Turing Test , which asked: Can machines think? This test became a central concept for evaluating machine understanding of language. In the mid-1950s, the Georgetown-IBM experiment attempted the first machine translation, converting 60 Russian sentences into English using a rule-based approach. Although limited, it sparked massive interest and...