Martin Kay

Martin Kay (1935 – 8 August 2021) was a computer scientist, known especially for his work in computational linguistics.

He was born in Edgware (Middlesex, Great Britain) in 1935 and he studied linguistics and computational linguistics at Trinity College in Cambridge.

His main interests were translation, both by people and machines, and computational linguistic algorithms, especially in the fields of morphology and syntax.

Kay began his career at the Cambridge language Research Unit in Cambridge, England under Margaret Masterman.

In 1958 he started to work at the Cambridge Language Research Unit, one of the earliest centres for research in what is now known as Computational Linguistics.

And the theory of Fully Automatic High Quality Translation was just the ideal level for machine translation after the criticisms by Bar-Hillel in his 1960s review of MT progress: "The goal of MT should not be the fully automatic high quality translation (FAHQT) that can replace human translators. Instead, MT should adopt less ambitious goals, e.g. more cost-effective human-machine interaction and aim at enhancement of human translation productivity."

[4] The useful of human translation was promoted to a new higher level.

According to this thought, Martin Kay proposed a more practical idea about the relationship between human and machine in the process of machine translation, called "translator's amanuensis".

1.1 Two arguments against the useful of machine translation

Because this idea includes the human and machine at the same time, so both computer scientists and linguists have responsibilities to the MT. But "they should never be asked to provide an engineering solution to a problem that they only dimly understand."

They just need to achieve "by doing only what can be done with absolute surety and reliability …can be virtually guaranteed to all concerned."

As the main parts of the translation, there are two related arguments against the plausibility of machine translation as an industrial enterprise from the point of view of linguistics and computer science.

Two arguments are commonly made for ad hoc solutions to the problems of machine translation.

In the former argument, "Ad hoc solutions tend to be based on case-by-case analyses of what linguists call surface phenomena, essentially strings of words, and on real or imagined statistical properties of particular styles of writing and domains of discourse."

Born and raised in the United Kingdom, he received his M.A. from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1961.

In 1961, he moved to the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California, US, where he eventually became head of research in linguistics and machine translation.

In 1961 David G. Hays hired him to work for the RAND Corporation; he subsequently worked for the University of California, Irvine and Xerox PARC.

Kay is one of the pioneers of computational linguistics and machine translation.

He was responsible for introducing the notion of chart parsing in computational

linguistics, and the notion of unification in linguistics generally.

With Ron Kaplan, he pioneered research and application development in finite-state morphology.

He has been a longtime contributor to, and critic of, work on machine translation.

In his seminal paper "The Proper Place of Men and Machines in Language Translation," Kay argued for MT systems that were tightly integrated in the human translation process.

He was reviewer and critic of EUROTRA, Verbmobil, and many other MT projects.

Kay was a former Chair of the Association of Computational Linguistics and President of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics.

After the ALPAC report in 1966, the conclusion was made as "There is no immediate or predictable prospect of useful MT producing useful translation of general scientific texts."

[2] And because of this result, the field of machine translation entered into a dark period.

From 1966 to 1976, almost ten years, few researches were done.

He left Rand in 1972 to become Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine.

In 1974, he moved to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center as a Research Fellow.

However, in 1980s, the Renaissance period was coming.

[3] "The Proper Place of Men and Machines in Language Translation" attracted more attention on the machine translation.

In this paper, new thoughts were achieved about the relationship between machine translation and human translation.

At that time, with the application of cheaper computers and broad usage of domains in machine translation, high quality outputs were badly needed.

In 1985, while retaining his position at Xerox PARC, he joined the faculty of Stanford University half-time.

He was most recently Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University and Honorary Professor of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University.

He was a Research Fellow at Xerox PARC until 2002.

He held an honorary doctorate of Gothenburg University.

Kay received the lifetime Achievement Award of the Association for Computational Linguistics for his sustained role as an intellectual leader of NLP research in 2005.

1. Martin Kay's "proper" paper [1]