Machine translation
Perhaps the best comment on Margaret's initiative in embarking on language processing research, and specifically on machine translation work, comes from a somewhat unexpected source. Machine translation, after an initial period of high hopes, and some large claims, was cast into outer darkness in 1966 by funding agencies who saw little return for their money. Reviewing twenty five years of artificial intelligence research in his presidential address to the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in 1985, Woody Bledsoe, one of the long-standing leaders of the field, though in areas quite outside language, said of those who attempted machine translation in the fifties and sixties: "They may have failed, but they were right to try; we have learned so much from their attempts to do something so difficult".