11 ALPAC : The ( In ) Famous Report

The best known event in the history of machine translation is without doubt the publication thirty years ago in November 1966 of the report by the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC 1966). Its e¤ect was to bring to an end the substantial funding of MT research in the United States for some twenty years. More significantly, perhaps, was the clear message to the general public and the rest of the scientific community that MT was hopeless. For years afterwards, an interest in MT was something to keep quiet about; it was almost shameful. To this day, the ‘failure’ of MT is still repeated by many as an indisputable fact. The impact of ALPAC is undeniable. Such was the notoriety of its report that from time to time in the next decades researchers would discuss among themselves whether ‘‘another ALPAC’’ might not be inflicted upon MT. At the 1984 ACL conference, for example, Margaret King (1984) introduced a panel session devoted to considering this very possibility. A few years later, the Japanese produced a report (JEIDA 1989) surveying the current situation in their country under the title: ‘‘A Japanese view of machine translation in light of the considerations and recommendations reported by ALPAC.’’ While the fame or notoriety of ALPAC is familiar, what the report actually said is now becoming less familiar and often forgotten or misunderstood—and this extensive summary includes therefore substantial extracts. The report itself is brief—a mere 34 pages—but it is supported by twenty appendices totalling a further 90 pages. Some of these appendices have had an impact as great as the report itself, in particular the evaluation study by John Carroll in Appendix 10. The first point to note is that the report is entitled: ‘‘Languages and Machines: Computers in Translation and Linguistics.’’ It was supposedly concerned, therefore, not just with MT but with the broader field of computational linguistics. In practice, most funded NLP research at the time was devoted to full-scale MT. The background to the committee is outlined in the Preface: