machine learning Moore's law Chomskyan transformational grammar corpus linguistics natural language linguistics
Up to the 1980s, most natural language processing systems were based on complex sets of hand-written rules.  Starting in the late 1980s, however, there was a revolution in natural language processing with the introduction of machine learning algorithms for language processing.  This was due to both the steady increase in computational power (see Moore's law) and the gradual lessening of the dominance of Chomskyan theories of linguistics (e.g. transformational grammar), whose theoretical underpinnings discouraged the sort of corpus linguistics that underlies the machine-learning approach to language processing.
