PROJECT: COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS
1950The mid-20th century. Mainframes hummed in cold rooms. The world was divided. In this tension, a question emerged:
"Could a machine be programmed to understand human language?"
Driven by the Cold War, the US and USSR needed to translate scientific documents instantly. The solution? Machine Translation.
"The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak"
"Дух желает, но плоть слаба"
"The vodka is good but the meat is rotten"
Fig 1.2: Early word-for-word substitution failure.
Deep Learning mastered complex patterns. This same tech powers modern language models.
In the late 2010s, the "Attention Mechanism" changed everything. Models like BERT and GPT could read entire documents at once, understanding context like never before.
Today, we stand at the edge of Multimodal AI—systems that see, hear, and speak.