Victor Yngve

Victor Huse Yngve, born on 5 July 1920 and died on 15 January 2012, was a professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught from 1953 to 1965. He was among the earliest researchers in computational linguistics and natural language processing, the use of computers to analyze and process languages. He wrote a program that produced random but well-formed sentences from a text, a children's book called Engineer Small and the Little Train. He also showed why the human brain can only process sentences below a certain depth of complexity, a limit he reached independently of George Miller's seven plus or minus two constituents in memory. Yngve was the author of COMIT, the first string processing language, built with collaborators at MIT between 1957 and 1965 to support linguistic research and machine translation. In his 1970 paper On Getting a Word in Edgewise he coined the term back channel behavior.