In late '80 Apple, exactly meanwhile Apple was explain to the whole planet what the mouse was, inside the ATG (the reserch dep of Apple), someone was working...
K. Papineni, S. Roukos, T. Ward, and W. Zhu. Computational Linguistics (ACL), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Philadelphia, page 311-318. (2002)