Victor Yngve

Who is Victor Yngve?

Victor H. Yngve was professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Chicago. He was one of the earliest researchers in computational linguistics and natural language processing, the use of computers to analyze and process languages. He created the first program to produce random but well-formed output sentences, given a text. Most importantly, he showed in computer processing terms why the human brain can only process sentences of a certain kind of complexity, ones that do not exceed a "depth limit" of the kind established independently by George Miller with his depth limit of "seven plus or minus two" sentence constituents in memory at any given time. Yngve was also the author of COMIT, the first string processing language, which was developed on the IBM 700/7000 series computers by Yngve and collaborators at MIT from 1957-1965. Yngve created the language for supporting computerized research in the field of linguistics, and more specifically, the area of machine translation for natural language processing.