I don’t know of any other notable advances until the 2010s brought the first interesting language generation results from neural networks.
“A Neural Probabilistic Language Model”—Bengio et al. (2000?
or 2003?) was cited by Turing award https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2000/hash/728f206c2a01bf572b5940d7d9a8fa4c-Abstract.htmlAlso worth knowing about: “Generating text with recurrent neural networks”—Ilya Sutskever, James Martens, Geoffrey E Hinton (2011)
“A Neural Probabilistic Language Model”—Bengio et al. (2000?
or 2003?) was cited by Turing award https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2000/hash/728f206c2a01bf572b5940d7d9a8fa4c-Abstract.html
Also worth knowing about: “Generating text with recurrent neural networks”—Ilya Sutskever, James Martens, Geoffrey E Hinton (2011)