History of Natural Language Processing

Interesting historical piece with hits about how things evolve.

Andrey Markov & Claude Shannon Counted Letters to Build the First Language-Generation Models

By Oscar Schwartz

This is part three of a six-part series on the history of natural language processing.
In 1913, the Russian mathematician Andrey Andreyevich Markov sat down in his study in St. Petersburg with a copy of Alexander Pushkin’s 19th century verse novel, Eugene Onegin, a literary classic at the time. Markov, however, did not start reading Pushkin’s famous text. Rather, he took a pen and piece of drafting paper, and wrote out the first 20,000 letters of the book in one long string of letters, eliminating all punctuation and spaces. Then he arranged these letters in 200 grids (10-by-10 characters each) and began counting the vowels in every row and column, tallying the results..... "