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.
His main interests were translation, both by people and machines, and computational linguistic algorithms, especially in the fields of morphology and syntax.
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.
Martin Kay's "proper" paper [1] 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."
At that time, with the application of cheaper computers and broad usage of domains in machine translation, high quality outputs were badly needed.
Instead, MT should adopt less ambitious goals, e.g. more cost-effective human-machine interaction and aim at enhancement of human translation productivity."
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."
"The main problem with the sorcerer's-apprentice argument is that the decision that a sentence could be translated without analysis can only be made after the fact.
"Suppose that the translators are provided with a terminal consisting of a keyboard, a screen, and some way of pointing at individual words and letters.
Using the pointing device, the translator can select a letter, word, sentence, line, or paragraph and, by pressing the appropriate key, cause some operation to be visited upon it."
"One of the options that should be offered to a user of the hypothetical system I have been describing, at a fairly early stage, be a command that will direct the program to translate the currently selected unit.
If he elects not to intervene at all, a piece of text purporting to translate the current unit will be displayed in the lower window of his screen.
Alternatively, he may ask to be consulted whenever the program is confronted with a decision of a specified type, when certain kinds of ambiguities are detected, or whatever.
By examining the contents of this store before embarking on the translation, a user may hope to get a preview of the difficulties ahead and to make some decisions in advance about how to treat them.
In the course of doing this or, indeed, for any reason whatever, the translator can call for a display of all the units in the text that contain a certain word, phrase, string of characters, or whatever.
First, the system is in a position to draw its human collaborator's attention to the matters most likely to need it, second, the decisions that have to be made in the course of translating a passage are rarely independent, third, one of the most important facilities in the system is the one that keeps track of words and phrases that are used in some special way in the current text.