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The Origin of Statistical Machine Translation

7/15/1949
Reprint of Weaver

Reprint of Weaver's essay in Locke & Booth's book on machine translation (1955).

On July 15, 1949 mathematician Warren Weaver, a student of Claude Shannon's information theory, and in charge of science grants at the Rockefeller Foundation, New York, circulated a memorandum entitled “Translation,” suggesting that language translation by computer might be possible.

Weaver's memorandum has been called the origin of statistical machine translation. 

(See Reading 10.1.)

Timeline Themes

Linguistics / Translation / Speech
Digital Humanities