What Was the Turning Point in NLP?

The first generation of NLP was built around this vision that we would figure out how language and reasoning works. This is the point where sort of the first machine translation system started getting meaningfully deployed. The statistical revolution kind of shifted toward this orientation of let's learn everything from data. Let's build models that are guided somewhat by our intuitions, but ultimately fill in a lot of the blanks by trying to infer what humans are doing from big datasets.