Syntactic Process

In computational linguistics, which began in the 1950's with machine translation, systems that are based mainly on the lexicon have a longer t r a d i t i o n than anything e l se f o r these purposes, twenty f i ve years must be allowed to count as a tradition. The bulk of many of the early translation systems was made up by a d ic t ionary whose ent r ies consisted of a rb i t ra ry ins t ruc t ions In machine language. In the early 60's, computational llnsulsts---at least those with theoretical pretentlons---abandoned this way of doing business for at least three related reasons: