Victor H. Yngve (July 5, 1920 – January 15, 2012) 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 (a children's book called
Engineer Small and the Little Train). 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" (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, the first string processing language (compare
SNOBOL,
TRAC, and
Perl), 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.