NLP is deeply intertwined with the formal study of language, both conceptually and historically. Arguably, this connection goes all the way back to Chomsky's Syntactic Structures in 1957. It also still holds true today, with a strand of recent works building formal analysis of modern neural networks methods in terms of formal languages. In this document, I aim to explain background about formal languages as they relate to this recent work. I will by necessity ignore large parts of the rich history of this field, instead focusing on concepts connecting to modern deep learning-based NLP.

翻译：NLP在概念上和历史上都与正式的语言研究密切相关。 可以说,这种联系完全可以追溯到1957年Chomsky的同步教学结构,今天也依然如此,最近对现代神经网络方法进行了一系列工作,从正式语言角度对现代神经网络方法进行正式分析,本文件旨在解释正式语言的背景,因为这些语言与最近的工作有关。 我将不得不忽略这个领域的丰富历史的大部分内容,而不是侧重于与现代深层学习型NLP相联系的概念。