Georgetown-IBM experiment
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The Georgetown-IBM experiment was an influential demonstration of machine translation, which was performed during January 7, 1954. Developed jointly by the Georgetown University and IBM, the experiment involved completely automatic translation of more than sixty Russian sentences into English.
Conceived and performed primarily in order to attract governmental and public interest and funding by showing the possibilities of machine translation, it was by no means a fully-featured system: It had only six grammar rules and 250 items in its vocabulary. Apart from general topics, the system was specialised in the domain of organic chemistry. The translation was done using a IBM 701 mainframe computer.
Well publicized by journalists and perceived as a success, the experiment did encourage governments to invest in computational linguistics. The authors claimed that within three or five years, machine translation would be a solved problem. However, the real progress was much slower, and after the ALPAC report in 1966, which found that the ten years long research had failed to fulfill the expectations, funding was reduced dramatically.
