The evolution of NLP and LLMs

NLP’s inception can be traced back to the 1950s and 1960s, a period characterized by exploratory efforts and foundational research. During these early years, NLP was primarily driven by rule-based methods and statistical approaches, setting the stage for more complex developments in the decades to follow.

Rule-based NLP relied heavily on sets of handcrafted rules. These rules were designed by linguists and computer scientists to instruct computers on how to interpret and process language. For instance, early systems would break down text into components such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and then apply a series of predefined rules to analyze sentence structures and meanings. This approach was limited by its reliance on explicit rules, making the systems brittle and unable to understand the nuances of human language.

Around the same time, statistical methods introduced a new paradigm in NLP. Unlike rule-based systems, statistical NLP did...