Logistic regression was developed in the field of statistics, where it was used for the analysis of binary data by the 1960s, and was particularly common in medicine (Cox, 1969) . Starting in the late 1970s it became widely used in linguistics as one of the formal foundations of the study of linguistic variation (Sankoff and Labov, 1979) . Nonetheless, logistic regression didn't become common in natural language processing until the 1990s, when it seems to have appeared simultaneously from two directions. The first source was the neighboring fields of information retrieval and speech processing, both of which had made use of regression, and both of which lent many other statistical techniques to NLP. Indeed a very early use of logistic regression for document routing was one of the first NLP applications to use (LSI) embeddings as word representations (Schütze et al., 1995) .