How artificial intelligence can teach itself slang - Futurity

In the early days, the field involved writing out symbolic rules of grammar--subject, noun, clauses, predicates with a verb, perhaps followed by a noun phrase, perhaps followed by a prepositional phrase and so forth. People worked for years trying to replicate grammar and lexicons. It worked fine in very small contexts, but never really extended to understanding meaning. Then in the '90s the first revolution came when masses of language became available online, digitally. It was then that people started to explore statistical methods of analyzing all that data and building probabilistic models of which words are likely to appear together to create meaning and sentiment.