History of NLP

NLP is an area that overlaps with others. It has emerged from fields such as artificial intelligence, linguistics, formal languages, and compilers. With the advancement of computing technologies and the increased availability of data, the way natural language is being processed has changed. Previously, a traditional rule-based system was used for computations. Today, computations on natural language are being done using machine learning and deep learning techniques.

The major work on machine learning-based NLP started during the 1980s. During the 1980s, developments across various disciplines such as artificial intelligence, linguistics, formal languages, and computations led to the emergence of an interdisciplinary subject called NLP. In the next section, we'll look at text analytics and how it differs from NLP.