ALPAC (Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee) was a committee of seven scientists led by John R. Pierce, established in 1964 by the United States government in order to evaluate the progress in computational linguistics in general and machine translation in particular. Its report, issued in 1966, gained notoriety for being very skeptical of research done in machine translation so far, and emphasizing the need for basic research in computational linguistics; this eventually caused the U.S. government to reduce its funding of the topic dramatically. The committee consisted of: