IDG Contributor Network: How computational linguistics went from Cold War communications to transforming enterprise work

The Cold War is often cited as the starting point for the scientific work around natural language processing (NLP) that has since evolved into computational linguistics, an artificial intelligence (AI) technology now in commercial use. The story goes, the phrase “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” once used to test the work that had been done, translated to Russian and back to English as “The vodka is strong, but the meat is rotten.” To say this technology&rsqu