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Automating Linguistics

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  • © 2021

Overview

Authors:
  1. Jacqueline Léon

    1. Laboratoire d’Histoire des Théories Linguistiques UMR CNRS 7597 Université de Paris, Paris, France

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  • Automation-mathematisation of the language sciences
  • Comparative study
  • History of natural language processing
  • History of machine translation, natural language processing and automatic discourse analysis in France
  • Methods by intermediary languages for machine translation

Part of the book series: History of Computing (HC)

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Table of contents (11 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xv
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  2. Introduction

    • Jacqueline Léon
    Pages 1-6

  3. Machine Translation as Technology of War

    • Jacqueline Léon
    Pages 7-20

  4. The War Effort, the Technologisation of Linguistics and the Emergence of Applied Linguistics

    • Jacqueline Léon
    Pages 21-30

  5. The Computational Turn and Formalisation in Neo-Bloomfieldian Distributionalism

    • Jacqueline Léon
    Pages 31-48

  6. Information Theory: Transfer of Terms, Concepts and Methods

    • Jacqueline Léon
    Pages 49-67

  7. From MT to Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing

    • Jacqueline Léon
    Pages 69-84

  8. Machine Translation of Semantics and Lexicon: New Issues and New Objects in the Long-Term History of the Language Sciences

    • Jacqueline Léon
    Pages 85-103

  9. The French Linguistic Tradition and External Reception of the Computational Mathematisation of Language

    • Jacqueline Léon
    Pages 105-119

  10. Automatic Documentation and Automatic Discourse Analysis: Specificity of Harris’s Reception in France

    • Jacqueline Léon
    Pages 121-139

  11. The Empiricist Turn of Automation- Mathematisation: Large Corpora, Restricted Languages and Sublanguages

    • Jacqueline Léon
    Pages 141-157

  12. General Conclusion

    • Jacqueline Léon
    Pages 159-163

  13. Back Matter

    Pages 165-179
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Keywords

About this book

Automating Linguistics offers an in-depth study of the history of the mathematisation and automation of the sciences of language. In the wake of the first mathematisation of the 1930s, two waves followed: machine translation in the 1950s and the development of computational linguistics and natural language processing in the 1960s. These waves were pivotal given the work of large computerised corpora in the 1990s and the unprecedented technological development of computers and software.
Early machine translation was devised as a war technology originating in the sciences of war, amidst the amalgamate of mathematics, physics, logics, neurosciences, acoustics, and emerging sciences such as cybernetics and information theory. Machine translation was intended to provide mass translations for strategic purposes during the Cold War. Linguistics, in turn, did not belong to the sciences of war, and played a minor role in the pioneering projects of machine translation.
Comparing the two trends, the present book reveals how the sciences of language gradually integrated the technologies of computing and software, resulting in the second-wave mathematisation of the study of language, which may be called mathematisation-automation. The integration took on various shapes contingent upon cultural and linguistic traditions (USA, ex-USSR, Great Britain and France). By contrast, working with large corpora in the 1990s, though enabled by unprecedented development of computing and software, was primarily a continuation of traditional approaches in the sciences of language sciences, such as the study of spoken and written texts, lexicography, and statistical studies of vocabulary.


Authors and Affiliations

  • Laboratoire d’Histoire des Théories Linguistiques UMR CNRS 7597 Université de Paris, Paris, France

    Jacqueline Léon

About the author

Jacqueline Léon is a senior researcher emeritus at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France. After several years working on natural language processing for discourse analysis, her research concerned conversation analysis and the history of dialogue theories. Since 1992, she has been working at the Laboratoire d’Histoire des Théories Linguistiques (CNRS, Université de Paris) on the history and epistemology of contemporary language sciences.



Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Automating Linguistics

  • Authors: Jacqueline Léon

  • Series Title: History of Computing

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70642-5

  • Publisher: Springer Cham

  • eBook Packages: Computer Science, Computer Science (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-70641-8Published: 27 April 2021

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-70644-9Published: 28 April 2022

  • eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-70642-5Published: 26 April 2021

  • Series ISSN: 2190-6831

  • Series E-ISSN: 2190-684X

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XV, 179

  • Number of Illustrations: 18 b/w illustrations

  • Topics: History of Computing, Pattern Recognition, Linguistics, general

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