Before 1700

• Leibniz and Descartes codified relationships between words and sentences.

1950

• Alan Turing wrote Computing Machinery and Intelligence which proposed the Turing test.

1954

• The Georgetown-IBM experiment translated over 60 Russian sentences

1961

• The Baseball Q&A program was developed.

1966

• The ALPAC report threw cold water on NLP research.

1968

• Marvin Minsky wrote Semantic Information Processing.

1970

• William Woods proposed augmented transition networks (ATN)

1980s

• NLP research turned to knowledge representation, programming logic, and reasoning in AI.
• SRI Core Language Engine
• Hopfield networks?
• NLP lexical?

2006

• IBM began developing Watson, a DeepQA program which could compete on Jeopardy.
• Long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks (RNN) became dominant.

2018

• Google introduced BERT