initiated at
Georgetown University in the early 1950s represented the first
systematic attempt to create a demonstrable machine translation system.
Throughout the decade and into the 1960s, a number of similar
university and government-funded research efforts took place in the
United States and Europe. At the same time, rapid developments in the
field of Theoretical Linguistics, culminating in the publication of
Noam Chomsky's "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax" (1965), revolutionized
the framework for the discussion and understanding of the phonology,
morphology, syntax and semantics of human language.

In 1966, the U.S. government-issued ALPAC (Automatic Language
Processing Advisory Committee) report offered a prematurely negative
assessment of the value and prospects of practical machine translation
systems, effectively putting an end to funding and experimentation in
the field for the next decade. It was not until the late 1970s, with
the growth of computing and language technology, that serious efforts
began once again. This period of renewed interest also saw the
development of the Transfer model of machine translation and the
emergence of the first commercial MT systems. While commercial ventures
such as SYSTRAN and METAL began to demonstrate the viability, utility
and demand for machine translation, these mainframe-bound systems also
illustrated many of the problems in bringing MT products and services
to market. High development cost, labor-intensive lexicography and
linguistic implementation, slow progress in developing new language
pairs, inaccessibility to the average user, and inability to scale
easily to new platforms are all characteristics of these second-
generation systems."

As explained in August 1998 by Eduard Hovy, head of the Natural
Language Group at USC/ISI (University of Southern
California/Information Sciences Institute), machine translation implies
"language-related applications/functionalities that are not
translation, such as information retrieval (IR) and automated text
summarization (SUM). You would not be able to find anything on the Web
without IR! -- all the search engines (AltaVista, Yahoo!, etc.) are
built upon IR technology. Similarly, though much newer, it is likely
that many people will soon be using automated summarizers to condense
(or at least, to extract the major contents of) single (long) documents
or lots of (any length) ones together."

= Experiences

In December 199