This is written in response to a Quora question, which asks about Robert Mercer's contribution to the development of machine translation technologies. Feel free to vote there for my answer on Quora!

Robert Mercer (Peter Brown and a few other folks) played a pivotal and crucial role in the creation of the first modern translation models. They were able to create the first modern large scale noisy-channel translation system and publish the first paper on the subject. They created a series of IBM Model X models and spearheaded a new research direction (which is huge nowadays).

Recently Robert achieved an ACL lifetime achievement award for his pioneering work on machine translation. He was recently interviewed on the topic and there is a nice transcript of the story that uncovers a lot of historical details: Twenty Years of Bitext.