[SIGCIS-Members] McConlogue and Simmons 1965, first NLP machine learning parser?

[Brian E Carpenter]

Hi,

As it happens my PhD topic in 1967-70 was speech recognition (not natural language processing, but the topics overlapped). I just checked the list of references in my thesis for the first time in rather a lot of years, and the only relevant citation seems to be:

Lindgren, N., Machine recognition of human language, IEEE Spectrum, March 1965, p. 114 and April 1965, p. 45.

I don't have copies, but I assume that a Spectrum article would include references to current work.

Note that the McConlogue/Simmons paper refers to quite a bit of previous work, so I suspect that as for most topics, Zeitgeist is a big part of the story. For example, the paper says "The system was tested on 400 elementary basic English sentences including 300 used earlier by Knowlton in a different learning parser." So no, this paper wasn't first-in-field. You'll also note that its dataset was trivial compared to what a modern LLM would learn from.

In the mid-1960s, approaches to language understanding were very much grammar-based, which is of course absolutely not how LLMs work today, and the McConlogue/Simmons paper is typical. I'm pretty sure I didn't see it at the time, or it would have been cited as background in my thesis. There was also quite a lot of work on Chomsky-style transformational grammar, for example in the Computational Linguistics Project under Joyce Friedman at Stanford CS. But ultimately grammar-based approaches were not the answer.

I think it's fair to say that the McConlogue/Simmons paper was leading-edge at the time. The authors were at SDC, which suggests Defense money (or should I now say War money? Will DARPA now be called WARPA?).

Regards/Ngā mihi
    Brian Carpenter

On 12-Sep-25 07:18, Hansen Hsu via Members wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> A woman in San Francisco recently reached out to CHM asking if a paper her mother, Keren McConlogue, co-published in CACM in 1965 is the first use of machine learning in a natural language parser, and what place it has in the history of machine learning and NLP.
> 
> /Analyzing English Syntax with a Pattern-Learning Parser/
> Analyzing English syntax with a pattern-learning parser | Communications of the ACM <https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/365660.365683>
> dl.acm.org <https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/365660.365683>
> 	365660.cover.jpg <https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/365660.365683>
> 
> <https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/365660.365683>
> 
> I can’t find anything earlier than this.
> Has anyone looked into the earliest uses of what would have been called “pattern recognition” in building a parser that could construct a syntactic grammar by learning from example sentences?
> 
> .........................................................
> 
> *Hansen Hsu, Ph.D.*
> *Curator, Software History Center*
> *Computer History Museum
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