Abstract
Philipp Koehn. Statistical Machine Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xii + 433 pp. ISBN 978-0-521-87415-1. 40 £, 60 USD. Reviewed by Vincent Vandeghinste and Frank Van Eynde (Leuven) The first attempts at Machine Translation (MT) date from the fifties. They were based on information theoretic principles and crude statistical techniques. Disappointment about the results, as worded in the ALPAC report (1966), and the growing tendency toward a formal and computational approach in linguistics led to a more knowledge-based methodology with the integration of morphological, syntactic and semantic modules. This was typical of the MT systems that were developed in the seventies and the eighties.