hmm-pos-tagging-transition

IN premiseentries/2026/06/21/wiki-Natural_language_processing.md

Created 2026-06-21T09:50:10+00:00

Hidden Markov Models applied to part-of-speech tagging marked the transition from rule-based to statistical NLP

Summary

This records the pivot where part-of-speech labeling moved from hand-written grammar rules to probability models learned from data, establishing that linguistic structure could be captured statistically rather than enumerated by rule. It matters because that assumption — that language decisions can be made by learned probabilities rather than explicit rules — underpins virtually every downstream approach in modern NLP, from parsing to machine translation.