ALPAC was a committee of seven scientists led by John R. Pierce, established in 1964 by the U. S. Government in order to evaluate the progress in computational linguistics

Computational linguistics

Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective....

 in general and machine translation

Machine translation

Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another.On a basic...

 in particular. Its report, issued in 1966, gained notoriety for being very skeptical of research done in machine translation so far, and emphasizing the need for basic research in computational linguistics; this eventually caused the U. S. Government to reduce its funding of the topic dramatically.

The ALPAC was set up in April 1964 with John R. Pierce as the chairman.

The committee consisted of:

1. John R. Pierce who at the time worked for Bell Telephone Laboratories
2. John B. Carroll, a psychologist from Harvard University
3. Eric P. Hamp, a linguist from the University of Chicago
4. David G. Hays, a Machine Translation researcher from RAND Corporation
5. Charles F.Hockett, a linguist from Cornell University
6. Anthony G.Oettinger, a Machine Translation researcher from Harvard University
7. Alan Perlis, an Artificial Intelligence researcher from Carnegie Institute of Technology

Testimony was heard from:

• Paul Garvin of Bunker-Ramo Corporation
• Gilbert King of Itek Corporation and previously from IBM
• Winfred P.Lehmann from University of Texas
• Jules Mersel of Bunker-Ramo Corporation

ALPAC’s final recommendations (p. 34) were, therefore, that research should be supported on:

1. practical methods for evaluation of translations;

2. means for speeding up the human translation process;

3. evaluation of quality and cost of various sources of translations;

4. investigation of the utilization of translations, to guard against production of translations that are never read;

5. study of delays in the over-all translation process, and means for eliminating them, both in journals and in individual items;

6. evaluation of the relative speed and cost of various sorts of machine-aided translation;

7. adaptation of existing mechanized editing and production processes in translation;

8. the over-all translation process; and

9. production of adequate reference works for the translator, including the adaptation of glossaries that now exist primarily for automatic dictionary look-up in machine translation

See also

• History of artificial intelligence
  History of artificial intelligence
  The history of artificial intelligence began in antiquity, with myths, stories and rumors of artificial beings endowed with intelligence or consciousness by master craftsmen; as Pamela McCorduck writes, AI began with "an ancient wish to forge the gods."...
  
  
• History of machine translation
  History of machine translation
  The history of machine translation generally starts in the 1950s, although work can be found from earlier periods. The Georgetown experiment in 1954 involved fully automatic translation of more than sixty Russian sentences into English. The experiment was a great success and ushered in an era of...
  
  
• AI winter
  AI winter
  In the history of artificial intelligence, an AI winter is a period of reduced funding and interest in artificial intelligence research. The process of hype, disappointment and funding cuts are common in many emerging technologies , but the problem has been particularly acute for AI...
  
  
• Lighthill Report
  Lighthill report
  The Lighthill report is the name commonly used for the paper "Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey" by James Lighthill, published in Artificial Intelligence: a paper symposium in 1973....
  
  

External links

• The report accessible on-line
• ALPAC: the (in)famous report — summary of the report (PDF)