Philipp Koehn is a computer scientist and researcher in the field of 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...

. His primary research interest is statistical machine translation

Statistical machine translation

Statistical machine translation is a machine translation paradigm where translations are generated on the basis of statistical models whose parameters are derived from the analysis of bilingual text corpora...

 and he is one of the inventors of a method called phrase based machine translation which is a sub-field of statistical translation methods that employs word groups (or so-called "phrases") as the basis of translation, expanding the previous word based approaches. A 2003 paper which he authored with Franz Josef Och

Franz Josef Och

Franz Josef Och is a German computer scientist and currently a researcher at Google.- Life and Work :He studied computer science at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg , Germany, where he graduated with a Dipl.Ing. degree in 1998...

 and Daniel Marcu  called Statistical phrase-based translation has attracted wide attention in Machine translation community and has been cited over a thousand times. Phrase based methods are widely used in machine translation applications in industry. An example of such a system is Google Translate

Google Translate

Google Translate is a free statistical machine translation service provided by Google Inc. to translate a section of text, document or webpage, into another language.The service was introduced in April 28, 2006 for the Arabic language...

.

Koehn is also among the maintainers of the Moses

Moses (machine translation)

Moses is a free software statistical machine translation engine that allows automatically training translation models for any language pair given a collection of source and target text pairs...

 machine translation software, which is an open source platform for developing Statistical machine translation systems given a parallel corpus for any language pair.. Moses software is funded by European Commission under the project Euromatrix. He also authored a book titled Statistical Machine Translation in 2009.
Koehn is a reader

Reader (academic rank)

The title of Reader in the United Kingdom and some universities in the Commonwealth nations like Australia and New Zealand denotes an appointment for a senior academic with a distinguished international reputation in research or scholarship...

 at the University of Edinburgh

University of Edinburgh

The University of Edinburgh, founded in 1583, is a public research university located in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The university is deeply embedded in the fabric of the city, with many of the buildings in the historic Old Town belonging to the university...

's School of Informatics

University of Edinburgh School of Informatics

The School of Informatics is an academic unit of the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, responsible for research, teaching, outreach and commercialisation in Informatics....

, and contributes to its Statistical Machine Translation Group which organizes workshops, seminars and project related to the subject.