Victor H. Yngve (July 5, 1920 – January 15, 2012W. John Hutchin
Victor Yngve obituary
aclweb.org; accessed August 15, 2017.) was professor of

linguistics Linguistics is the science, scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure ...

at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...

and the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

(1953-1965). 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, a children's book called ''Engineer Small and the Little Train''. Most importantly, he showed in computer processing terms why the

human brain The human brain is the central organ (anatomy), organ of the human nervous system, and with the spinal cord makes up the central nervous system. The brain consists of the cerebrum, the brainstem and the cerebellum. It controls most of the act ...

can only process sentences of a certain kind of complexity, ones that do not exceed a "depth limit" (which has nothing to do with length) 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 COMIT was the first string processing language (compare SNOBOL, TRAC, and Perl), developed on the IBM 700/7000 series computers by Dr. Victor Yngve, University of Chicago, and collaborators at MIT from 1957 to 1965. Yngve created the language ...

, the first string processing language (compare

SNOBOL SNOBOL ("StriNg Oriented and symBOlic Language") is a series of programming languages developed between 1962 and 1967 at AT&T Bell Laboratories by David J. Farber, Ralph E. Griswold and Ivan P. Polonsky, culminating in SNOBOL4. It was one of ...

TRAC Trac is an open-source, web-based project management and bug tracking system. It has been adopted by a variety of organizations for use as a bug tracking system for both free and open-source software and proprietary projects and products. Tra ...

, and

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offic ...

), 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. In his 1970 paper "On Getting a Word in Edgewise", Yngve coined the term 'back channel behavior' to describe the conversational phenomenon that to this day is known in the linguistic literature as back-channeling. According to Duncan, Yngve's paper also suggested the term

turn-taking Turn-taking is a type of organization in conversation and discourse where participants speak one at a time in alternating turns. In practice, it involves processes for constructing contributions, responding to previous comments, and transitioning ...

, independently of Erving Goffman (Duncan, 1972: 283).

References

Sources

* Yngve, V. "A programming language for mechanical translation", ''Mechanical Translation, Vol. 5'', pp. 25–41 (July 1958) * Duncan, S. "Some signals and rules for taking turns in conversations", ''Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 23, No. 2'', pp. 283–292 (1972)

External links

Interview
dcs.shef.ac.uk; accessed August 15, 2017.
Interview video
accessed August 15, 2017.
In Memoriam
1920 births 2012 deaths Linguists from the United States University of Chicago faculty Computational linguistics researchers Natural language processing researchers {{US-linguist-stub