Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
sentence. In this case no corresponding word appears in the target
sentence.
6. A word is inserted in the target sentence which has no correspond-
ing word in the source sentence. This might, for example, be to
clarify the meaning of the target sentence.
On 7 January 1954, the Georgetown/IBM team unveiled the Russian-
to-English program publicly, running on an IBM 901 computer, at the
company's Technical Computing Bureau in New York. Although the
project had little scientific value, the program's achievement in that
demonstration caused the idea of Machine Translation to catch fire in the
press. The following day the programmade headline news when the
New
Yo rk Time s
carried a front-page report of the demonstration, describing
how several short messages, within the 250-word range of the device,
were translated. Included were brief statements in Russian about politics,
law, mathematics, chemistry, metallurgy, military affairs and communi-
cations. The machine would ring a bell to indicate its rejection of any
incoherent statements or when it encountered a misprint. The Russian
sentences were all turned into good English almost instantaneously, and
without any human intervention.
Dostert described the 1954 demonstration as “a Kitty Hawk of elec-
tronic translation.” [8] The success of the project promised enormous
implications for both linguistics and electronics, and the general public
was impressed with the program's performance; Machine Translation was
now seen as a feasible objective and the translation quality was certainly
acceptable. The demonstration undoubtedly encouraged U.S. govern-
ment agencies to support research on a large scale for the next decade,
and it stimulated the establishment of MT groups in other countries,
notably in the U.S.S.R.
The 1956 Dartmouth Workshop
If Turing's article “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” was the cata-
lyst that helped conceive Artificial Intelligence as a science, the birthplace
of this embryonic science was Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
In 1955 John McCarthy, then an assistant professor of mathematics at
Dartmouth, had the idea for a summer workshop to study the state of
the art in a discipline that he had just christened Artificial Intelligence,
