WHEN IS THE NEXT ALPAC REPORT DUE ? 
Margaret KING 
Dalle MolIe Institute for Semantic and Cognitive Studies 
University of Geneva 
Switzerland 
~.~chine translation has a scme%~at checquered 
history. There were already proposals for autcmatic 
translation systems in the 30's, but it was not 
until after the second world war that real enthu- 
siasm led to heavy funding and unrealistic expec- 
tations. Traditionally, the start of intensive 
work on machine translation is taken as being a 
memorand~n of Warren Weaver, then Director of the 
Natural Sciences Division of the Rockefeller 
Foundation, in 1949. In this memorandL~n, called 
'Translation', Weaver took stock of earlier work 
done by Booth and Richens. He likened the problem 
of machine translation to the problem of code 
breaking, for which digital cc~uters had been 
used with considerable success : "It is very 
tempting to say that a book written in Chinese 
is silly a book written in English which was 
coded into the 'Chinese code'. If we have useful 
methods for solving almost any cryptographic pro- 
blem, may it not be that with proper interpreta- 
tion we already have useful methods for transla- 
tion?" (Weaver, 1949). 
Weaver's m~rorand~ led to a great deal of 
activity in resoarch on machine translation, and 
eventually to the first conference on the topic, 
organised by Bar-Hillel in 1952. At this confe- 
rence, optimism reigned. Afterwards, tea~s in a 
number of American universities pursued research 
along the general lines agreed at the conference 
to be fruitful. At Georgetown University, L.E. 
Dostert started up a machine translation project 
with the declared aim of building a pilot system 
to convince potential funding agencies of the 
feasibility and the practicability of machine 
translation. This led in 1954 to the famous 
Georgetown experiment, a pilot system translating 
from Russian to English, which was hailed as an 
unqualified success: during the next ten years 
over 20 million dollars were invested in machine 
translation by various US government agencies. 
An idea of the anount of resoarch between 
1956 and 1959 can be gained by considering that in 
those years no fewer than twelve research groups 
were established in the US, a number of groups 
in the USSR ca~e into existence, most within the 
Academy of Sciences in Moscow, and two British 
Universities were carrying on research. 
Most of the systems developed were based on 
what Buchmann (1984) has called a 'brute force' 
approach: Syntactic analysis was only done at 
a local word-centred level, both so-called syntax 
and dictionary cc~pilation ~ere very narrowly 
corpus based, and thus almost totally empirical. 
Indeed, the problem of machine translation was 
perceived as being an engineering problem requir- 
ing clever programming rather than linguistic 
insight. 
By_ the late 1960"s, workers in mchine trans- 
lation themselves had begun to see that the enpi- 
rical approach was unsatisfactory. The European 
projects begun in the early 1960's at Grenoble 
and Milan reflect this, as does the work of the 
group sot up in Montreal in 1962. These groups 
based their work from the start on clear theore- 
tical foundations (dependency theory in Grenoble, 
correlational grammar in Milan, transformational 
theory in Montreal). 
However, the growing perception that brute 
force was not enough came too late to save re- 
search in the US. In 1964, the US National Academy 
of Sciences set up an investigatory committee, 
the Autcmatic Language Processing Advisory C~n- 
mlttee (ALPAC), with the task of investigating 
the results so far obtained and advising on fur- 
ther funding. The committee, in setting up a fra~e- 
work for assessing machine translation, considered 
such questions as quality and effectiveness of 
h~an translation, t_he time and money required 
for scientists to learn Russian, amounts spent 
for translation within the US goverrfaent and the 
need for translations and translators. Based on 
such criteria, the committee care to a strong 
negative conclusion '... we do not have useful 
machine translation. Further, there is no imme- 
diate or predictable prospect of useful machine 
translation '. 
The ALPAC report effectively killed machine 
translation research in the States, although some 
European projects survived. 
In the years since the ALPAC report, a number 
of commercial systems has been developed, some of 
them, ironically, based on the very system so 
roundly condemned by the ALPAC conndttee. Two 
trends can he distinguished: systems, such as 
SYSTRAN, which still aim at no significant human 
intervention during the translation process, but 
accept pre- and/or post-editing, and interactive 
systems which aim primarily at being translators' 
aids, such as Weidner or Alps. 
352 
In recent years, partially because the deve- 
lopment of commercial systems renewed faith in the 
feasibility of mad%ine translation, partially 
because of the results achievt~ by the surviving 
res~ar~--h projects, above all because of the grow- 
ing and pressing need for tramslation, research in 
machine translation has begun to revive. At the 
recreant, the European Ccnmunity is sponsoring a 
large research and development programme, France 
has a National Project on machine translation, a 
very large ntm~r of projects are being funded in 
Japan and a German Corporation is proposing 
mercial development of a system developed at the 
University of Texas. 
There are people who see strong parallels 
between the present situation and that ~ately 
before the publication of the ALPAC report, fore- 
seeing a second 'failure' for machine translation 
as a discipline. Others believe that advances in 
linguistics and in computer science, together with 
the results of the last twenty years, justify a 
cautious optimism, especially when the more rea- 
listic expectations of today's research workers 
(and of their funding authorities) are taken into 
account. 
The panel discussion will aim at clarifying 
similarities and differences in the two states 
of the world, weighing both scientific conside- 
rations and other relevant factors. 
The availability of Buc~m~%n (1984) greatly 
facilitated the writing of the first part of this 
panel paper. I would like to record my thanks to 
its author. 
REFERENCES 
ALPAE, 1966. Language and Machines{ C~ters in 
Translation and Linguistics. Washington D.C., 
Publication 1416, National Academy of Sciences. 
Buchmann, B. Early His.tor~ of Machine Translation.. 
Paper prepared for the Lugano Tutorial on 
Machine Translation, April 1984. 
Wea%~r, W. Translation. New York, 1949. Mimeo. 
353 
