Prolog
A logic programming language was created in Marseille to program a system for conversing with a machine in French.
Why it matters
Prolog established the approach where knowledge is written as rules and facts and answers come from inference — the main alternative to statistical learning in that period.
The artificial intelligence group at Luminy was funded under a contract on man-machine communication in natural language with automatic deduction, which ran from February 1972 to June 1973. The group's report on it says that PROLOG, a language based on automatic theorem proving, was developed within the contract and that the whole system was programmed in it. The authors offer it to linguists as a tool for processing natural languages. The report gives no date for the first implementation: autumn 1972, the Algol-W language and running on the University of Grenoble's machine by teletype come only from Colmerauer and Roussel's 1992 retrospective, whose own abstract speaks of a preliminary version as early as the end of 1971. In 1973 Battani and Meloni wrote an interpreter in Fortran. The year is therefore marked approximate.