IRE Symposium on Information Theory
One symposium brought together papers on the limits of finite-state machines for language, on Logic Theorist, and on the limits of human memory.
Why it matters
Language, search and memory were discussed as a single subject for the first time, and the split between statistical and structural accounts of language opened here.
In Three Models for the Description of Language, Chomsky showed that a Markov chain does not generate English grammar and proposed generative rules instead. The claim pushed statistical language models aside for thirty years; the field returned to them only once large corpora existed.