Philipp Koehn

Machine translation researcher


Philipp Koehn is a machine translation researcher and co-inventor of phrased-based statistical machine translation.

In 2003, while at the University of Southern California, he co-authored a paper on phrase-based statistical machine translation, along with Franz Josef Och and Daniel Marcu.

His early contributions to machine translation include:

  • the Moses machine translation system
  • the Europarl corpus
  • organising the machine translation research community, including WMT

He became a professor at the University of Edinburgh and then Johns Hopkins University, and joined Omniscien Technologies as Chief Scientist.

In 2021, he joined Facebook AI Research as a Research Scientist, while continuing his affiliatons with Johns Hopkins University and Omniscien.

Koehn is a noted leader within the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). He was founding president of the ACL Special Interest Group on Machine Translation and former president of the ACL Special Interest Group on Linguistic Data and Corpus-Based Approaches to natural language processing. His ACL leadership includes co-chairing the series of ACL workshops and conferences on Machine Translation since 2005 and chairing several ACL workshops on Statistical Machine Translation. In addition, Koehn has chaired the Machine Translation Marathon and co-chaired the Machine Translation Marathon in the Americas.

He received a master’s in computer science (1994) from the University of Tennessee, a diplom, computer science from the Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (1997), and a doctorate in computer science from the University of Southern California (2003).


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