Tootfinder

Following the election of Robert Prevost as the new Pope today, YDS asked professor Teresa Berger for perspective. Teresa Berger is Professor of Liturgical Studies and Thomas E. Golden Jr. Professor of Catholic Theology.
Here is our brief exchange:
https://divinity.yale.edu/news/new-pop

Building on the 90s, statistical n-gram language models, trained on vast text collections, became the backbone of NLP research. They fueled advancements in nearly all NLP techniques of the era, laying the groundwork for today's AI.
F. Jelinek (1997), Statistical Methods for Speech Recognition, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
#NLP

Abuse in Buddhism: The Law of Silence https://openbuddhism.org/library/videos/2022/elodie-emery-wandrille-lanos-present-buddhism-the-unspeakable-truth/

Mattel combines its film and television production units into a single unit under the direction of Mattel Films president and Barbie producer Robbie Brenner (Jeremy Fuster/The Wrap)
https://www.thewrap.com/mattel-combines-film-tv-units-under-robbie-bren…

Mattel Combines Film, TV Units Under Robbie Brenner
The exec and "Barbie" producer will be president and chief content officer of the unified company

Next stop on our NLP timeline (as part of the #ISE2025 lecture) was Terry Winograd's SHRDLU, an early natural language understanding system developed in 1968-70 that could manipulate blocks in a virtual world.
Winograd, T. Procedures as a Representation for Data in a Computer Program for Understanding Natural Language. MIT AI Technical Report 235.

The First Compute Arms Race: the Early History of Numerical Weather Prediction
Charles Yang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21816 https://…

The First Compute Arms Race: the Early History of Numerical Weather Prediction
This paper traces the global race to apply early electronic computers to numerical weather prediction in the decades following World War Two. A brief overview of the early history of numerical weather prediction in the United States, United Kingdom, Sweden, Canada, and Japan is provided. Three critical factors that shaped the development of a national numerical weather prediction are identified: compute capabilities, institution building and state capacity, and talent. Several generalizable les…

Abuse in Buddhism: The Law of Silence https://openbuddhism.org/library/videos/2022/elodie-emery-wandrille-lanos-present-buddhism-the-unspeakable-truth/

Last leg on our brief history of NLP (so far) is the advent of large language models with GPT-3 in 2020 and the introduction of learning from the prompt (aka few-shot learning).
T. B. Brown et al. (2020). Language models are few-shot learners. NIPS'20
https://…