Natural Language Processing: A Terminological and Statistical Approach

The aim of this article is to provide a statistical representation of significant terms used in the field of Natural Language Processing from the 1960s till nowadays, in order to draft a survey on the most significant research trends in that period. By retrieving these keywords it should be possible to highlight the ebb and flow of some thematic topics. The NLP terminological sample derives from a database created for this purpose using the DBT software (Textual Data Base, ILC patent). Scientific presentations at the main conferences of the ‘60s point out a frequent recurrence of expressions such as mécanisation des études lexicologique, les machines à cartes perforées et leurs application lexicologique, which trace back to the origin of electronic processing of linguistic data and to some solutions of linguistic-literary problems, to lexicographic researches, to scientific terminology, to automatic dictionaries, to homographs, synonyms and the possibility of producing indexes and concordances by means of an electronic processor. Terms such as meccanizzazione, mechanical translation, machine à traduire used by experts of the field in the 1950s and 1960s seem to well testify the change, the shift, the beginning and then the final consecration of a rapidly evolving field: Natural Language Processing.