Georgetown–IBM experiment

The Georgetown–IBM experiment was an influential demonstration of machine translation, which was
performed during January 7, 1954. Developed jointly by the Georgetown University and IBM, the
experiment involved completely automatic translation of more than sixty Russian sentences into
English.[1][2]

Contents
Background
Six rules
Translation examples
Reception
References
External links

Background
Conceived and performed primarily in order to attract governmental and public interest and funding by
showing the possibilities of machine translation, it was by no means a fully featured system: It had only six
grammar rules and 250 lexical items in its vocabulary (of stems and endings).[3] This complete dictionary
was never fully shown (only the extended one from Garvin's article). Apart from general topics, the system
was specialised in the domain of organic chemistry. The translation was carried out using an IBM 701
mainframe computer (launched in April 1953). Sentences had to be punched onto cards.

The Georgetown-IBM experiment is the best-known result of the MIT conference in June 1952 to which
all active researchers in the machine translation field were invited. At the conference, Duncan Harkin from
US Department of Defense suggested that his department would finance a new machine translation
project.[4] Jerome Weisner supported the idea and offered finance from the Research Laboratory of
Electronics at MIT. Leon Dostert had been invited to the project for his previous experience with the
automatic correction of translations (back then 'mechanical translation'); his interpretation system had a
strong impact on the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. The linguistics part of the demonstration was carried
out for the most part by linguist Paul Garvin who had also good knowledge of Russian.

Over 60 Romanized Russian statements from a wide range of political, legal, mathematical, and scientific
topics were entered into the machine by a computer operator who knew no Russian, and the resulting
English translations appeared on a printer.

The sentences to be translated were carefully selected. Many operations for the demonstration were fitted to
specific words and sentences. In addition, there was no relational or sentence analysis which could
recognize the sentence structure. The approach was mostly 'lexicographical' based on a dictionary where a
specific word had a connection with specific rules and steps.[5]
Six rules
Operation 0 – An exact equivalent for an translated item exists. Any further steps needed.[6]
Operation 1 – Rearrangement of the position of the words. AB > BA
Operation 2 – The several choices problem. The result is based on the consecutive words
(maximum of three).
Operation 3 – Also several problems. But the result depends on the previous words
(maximum of three).
Operation 4 – Omissions of the lexical (morphological) item. The source item would be
redundant.
Operation 5 – Insertion of the lexical (morphological) item. The item is not present in the
output language.

Translation examples
Russian (Romanized)
Mi pyeryedayem mislyi posryedstvom ryechyi.
Vyelyichyina ugla opryedyelyayetsya otnoshyenyiyem dlyini
dugi k radyiusu.
Myezhdunarodnoye ponyimanyiye yavlyayetsya vazhnim
faktorom v ryeshyenyiyi polyityichyeskix voprosov.
English translation
We transmit thoughts by means of speech.
Magnitude of angle is determined by the relation of
length of arc to radius.
International understanding constitutes an
important factor in decision of political questions.

Reception
Well publicized by journalists and perceived as a success, the experiment did encourage governments to
invest in computational linguistics. The authors claimed that within three or five years, machine translation
could well be a solved problem. However, the real progress was much slower, and after the ALPAC report
in 1966, which found that the ten years of long research had failed to fulfill the expectations, funding was
reduced dramatically.

The demonstration was given widespread coverage in the foreign press, but only a small fraction of
journalists drew attention to previous machine translation attempts.[7]

References
1. Nye, Mary Jo (2016). "Speaking in Tongues: Science's centuries-long hunt for a common
language" (https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/magazine/speaking-in-tongues).
Distillations. 2 (1): 40–43. Retrieved 22 March 2018.
2. Gordin, Michael D. (2015). Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After
Global English. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226000299.
3. John Hutchins. "The first public demonstration of machine translation: the Georgetown-IBM
system, 7th January 1954". S2CID 132677 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:13267
7).
4. Reynolds, A. Craig (1954). "The conference on mechanical translation". Mechanical
Translation. 1 (3): 47–55.
5. Reifler, Erwin (February 2–5, 1960). "The solution of MT linguistic problems through
lexicography". Proceedings of the National Symposium on Machine Translation.
6. Dostert, Leon E. (1955). "The Georgetown–I.B.M. experiment, 124–135". Locke and Booth.
 7. Hutchins, John (1997). "From first conception to first demonstration: the nascent years of
machine translation, 1947-1954. A chronology". Machine Translation 12, 195-252. 12 (3):
195–252. doi:10.1023/A:1007969630568 (https://doi.org/10.1023%2FA%3A100796963056
8). S2CID 197591 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:197591).

External links
A summary of the Georgetown–IBM experiment (http://www.hutchinsweb.me.uk/GU-IBM-200
5.pdf)
IBM press release concerning the demonstration (http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibit
s/701/701_translator.html)

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