A reference on how NLP led to modern language models
NLP Lineage
It records 200 milestones from 1948 to 2026, and the 414 relationships between them. Each milestone and each relationship links to its primary source.
Where to start
- Guided tour
How language models came to be: the story in 14 chapters, with working diagrams.
- Milestones
All 200, in date order, from 1948 to 2026. Filter them by thread, kind and year.
- Timeline
Every milestone by year, under its main thread, on one page.
- Turning points
The 25 milestones that changed the most, by a rule measured from the documented links.
- Threads
The 10 research threads, and the milestones on each one.
- Glossary
51 terms, each defined in plain words.
The threads
- Language modelling
68 milestones
- Representation and retrieval
22 milestones
- Scale and data
42 milestones
- Efficiency and infrastructure
44 milestones
- Alignment
26 milestones
- Reasoning
51 milestones
- Multimodality
21 milestones
- Agents
36 milestones
- Open weights
37 milestones
- Products and governance
23 milestones