ALPAC report
In plain wordsA 1966 US government report that concluded machine translation was slower, worse and costlier than human translators. It ended most American funding for the field for many years.
'Language and Machines: Computers in Translation and Linguistics' (1966), the report of the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee, formed in 1964 under the US National Academy of Sciences at the request of government agencies that had funded machine translationmachine translation, n.: Software that renders writing or speech in one language into another language, as online translation services and phone translation apps do.. Comparing machine output from Russian with human translation, the committee found machine translation slower, less accurate and about twice as expensive, saw no near prospect of useful general-purpose systems, and judged the supply of human translators adequate. It recommended redirecting money to basic research in computational linguistics and to practical aids for human translators. US funding for machine translation collapsed, the center of the field moved to Europe, Canada and Japan, and the report is often cited as an early trigger of the first AI winterAI winter, n.: A slump in which disappointment over AI's unmet promises leads governments and companies to pull back money and attention. Historians count two big ones: one in the 1970s and one starting in the late 1980s..
Statistical translation researchers of the 1990s liked to point out what the ALPAC report had got right and what it had got wrong.
Origin
The committee, chaired by John R. Pierce of Bell Telephone Laboratories, reported in November 1966, after a decade of optimism launched by the Georgetown–IBM experimentGeorgetown–IBM experiment, prop. n.: A 1954 public demonstration in New York in which an IBM computer translated about sixty Russian sentences into English. It raised hopes for automatic translation that took decades to fulfill. of 1954, whose organizers had predicted practical machine translation within a few years.
Related
- machine translationmachine translation, n.: Software that renders writing or speech in one language into another language, as online translation services and phone translation apps do.
- Georgetown–IBM experimentGeorgetown–IBM experiment, prop. n.: A 1954 public demonstration in New York in which an IBM computer translated about sixty Russian sentences into English. It raised hopes for automatic translation that took decades to fulfill.
- AI winterAI winter, n.: A slump in which disappointment over AI's unmet promises leads governments and companies to pull back money and attention. Historians count two big ones: one in the 1970s and one starting in the late 1980s.
- Lighthill reportLighthill report, prop. n.: A 1973 review written for a British government research council that judged AI research to have fallen far short of its promises. It led to deep cuts in AI funding in the United Kingdom.
- natural language processingnatural language processing, n.: The field that teaches computers to handle human language — to read, interpret, translate, summarize and produce text and speech. It is one of the oldest and largest areas of artificial intelligence.
Sources
- Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (1966). Language and Machines: Computers in Translation and Linguistics. Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences – National Research Council, Publication 1416.
Mentioned in
AI winterAI winter, n.: A slump in which disappointment over AI's unmet promises leads governments and companies to pull back money and attention. Historians count two big ones: one in the 1970s and one starting in the late 1980s., evaluationevaluation, n.: Testing an AI system to find out what it can and cannot do, how well, and how safely — from exam-style quizzes to hands-on trials and expert reviews., Association for Computational LinguisticsAssociation for Computational Linguistics, prop. n.: The scientific society at the center of research on language technology, from translation software to chatbots. It runs the field's leading conferences and a free online archive of their papers., human evaluationhuman evaluation, n.: Judging an AI's outputs by asking people to rate or compare them, because for many tasks — writing, conversation, translation — no automatic score captures quality well., machine translationmachine translation, n.: Software that renders writing or speech in one language into another language, as online translation services and phone translation apps do., Georgetown–IBM experimentGeorgetown–IBM experiment, prop. n.: A 1954 public demonstration in New York in which an IBM computer translated about sixty Russian sentences into English. It raised hopes for automatic translation that took decades to fulfill., Lighthill reportLighthill report, prop. n.: A 1973 review written for a British government research council that judged AI research to have fallen far short of its promises. It led to deep cuts in AI funding in the United Kingdom.