There were massive problems. Linguistics was a new science, not yet recognized as an independent field meriting university departments. Grammars and dictionaries were totally inadequate. Software was developed for the much simpler number system; it achieved limited success on the cumbersome pre-transistorized hardware. Then, after a decade of research, funding was abruptly cut off in response to recommendations by a National Academy of Sciences committee headed by John Pierce, a non-linguist, and funded by the National Science Foundation. While some support continued, NSF gave no further attention to machine translation until 1985, when it co-sponsored a conference with the Association for Computational Linguistics at Colgate University. Most of the papers in this volume are revised versions of those presented at the conference.
The editor, Sergei Nirenburg of the International Center on Machine Translation at Carnegie-Mellon University, indicates in the opening pages that the book deals largely with theory and procedures. ...
