Statistical machine translation
An IBM group proposed translating without grammatical rules: learn the probabilities of word correspondences from millions of aligned sentences.
Why it matters
Language became a problem of estimating probabilities from data, and that shift shaped everything that followed.
The model treats a French sentence as an English one corrupted by a noisy channel and searches for the most likely source. The data were the proceedings of the Canadian parliament, published in both languages. Linguists received the work with hostility; Frederick Jelinek of the same group became known for the remark that system quality rises every time a linguist leaves. The full account of the models appeared in 1993.