A history of machine translation (MT) from the point of view of a major writer and innovator in the field is the subject of this book. It details the deep differences between rival groups on how best to do MT, and presents a global perspective covering historical and contemporary systems in Europe, the US and Japan. The author considers MT as a fundamental part of Artificial Intelligence and the ultimate test-bed for all computational linguistics.

Author won Antonio Zampolli prize for outstanding contributions to the language technology

MT Past.- Five Generations of MT.- An Artificial Intelligence Approach to Machine Translation.- It Works but How Far Can It Go: Evaluating the SYSTRAN MT System.- MT Present.- Where Am I Coming From: The Reversibility of Analysis and Generation in Natural Language Processing.- What are Interlinguas for MT: Natural Languages, Logics or Arbitrary Notations?.- Stone Soup and the French Room: The Statistical Approach to MT at IBM.- The Revival of US Government MT Research in 1990.- The Role of Linguistic Knowledge Resources in MT.- The Automatic Acquisition of Lexicons for an MT System.- MT Future.- Senses and Texts.- Sense Projection.- Lexical Tuning.- What Would Pragmatics-Based Machine Translation be Like?.- Where was MT at the End of the Century: What Works and What Doesn't?.- The Future of MT in the New Millennium.