The Evolution of Natural Language Processing: From Bag of Words to Generative AI

Abstract

The evolution of Natural Language Processing represents a journey from basic statistical methods to advanced artificial intelligence systems. Starting with foundational approaches like Bag of Words and TF-IDF, the field progressed through neural architectures including RNNs and Transformers, culminating in today's large language models. Each advancement has elevated capabilities in language understanding, translation, and generation. The transformation continues through multimodal integration, efficiency enhancements, reasoning improvements, and trustworthy AI development, while addressing fundamental technical challenges that will shape artificial intelligence's future landscape.