Yehoshua Bar-Hillel (1915-1975) was a philosopher, mathematician and linguist at MIT and the Hebrew University. He is best known for his pioneering work in the field of Machine translation (MT).

Hired by MIT as the first academic to work full-time in the field of MT, Bar-Hillel organized the first international conference on Machine Translation in 1952, but in later years he expressed doubts that fully automatic high-quality machine translation (FAHQMT) would ever be feasible.

Bar-Hillel also contributed to the field of set theory, and collaborated with philosopher Rudolph Carnap and linguist Noam Chomsky.

Bar-Hillel's daughter Maya Bar-Hillel is a cognitive psychologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Select Bibliography:

• 1958 - with Abraham Fraenkel and Azriel Levi , Foundations of Set Theory
• 1964 - Language and Information
• 1970 - Aspects of Language: Essays and Lectures on Philosophy of Language, Linguistic Philosophy and Methodology of Linguistics
• 1972 - Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science (Editor)
• 1975 - Pragmatics of Natural Languages (Editor)

External links:

• Bar-Hillel and Machine Translation: Then and Now
• The Future of MT is now and Bar-Hillel was (almost entirely) Right
• Milestones in Machine Translation
• Bar-Hillel Colloquium