Machine translation

Machine Translation (MT) of natural human languages is not a subject about which most scholars feel neutral. This field has had a long, colorful career, and boasts no shortage of vociferous detractors and proponents alike. During its first decade in the 1950s, interest and support were fueled by visions of high-speed high-quality translation of arbitrary texts (especially those of interest to the military and intelligence communities who funded MT projects). During its second decade in the 1960s, disillusionment crept in as the number and difficulty of the linguistic problems became increasingly obvious, and as it was realized that the translation problem was not nearly so amenable to automated solution as had been thought. The climax came with the delivery of the National Academy of Sciences ALPAC report (1966), condemning the field and, indirectly, its workers alike. The ALPAC report was criticized as narrow, biased, and shortsighted, but its recommendations were adopted (except that expenditures for long-term research in computational linguistics were NOT increased, but instead decreased), and as a result most MT projects in the U.S. were cancelled. By 1973, the early part of the third decade of MT, only three government-funded projects were left in the United States, and by late 1975 there were none. (The University of Texas METAL project was subsequently funded, from 1977 to 1980). Paradoxically, MT systems were still being used by various government agencies here and abroad, because there was simply no alternative means of quickly gathering information