Developed jointly by Georgetown University and IBM, the experiment involved completely automatic translation of more than sixty Russian sentences into English.
[1][2] 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).
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.
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.