Philipp Koehn

Philipp Koehn (born August 1, 1971, in Erlangen, Bavaria) is a German and American computer scientist known for statistical and neural machine translation. He studied at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and the University of Tennessee before earning his PhD in computer science from the University of Southern California in 2003 under Kevin Knight, then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT under Michael Collins. He joined the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics as a lecturer in 2005, was promoted to reader in 2010 and professor in 2012, and has been a professor in the computer science department at Johns Hopkins University, affiliated with its Center for Language and Speech Processing, since 2014. His 2003 paper Statistical Phrase-Based Translation, with Franz Josef Och and Daniel Marcu, has been cited more than a thousand times, and he created and maintains the Europarl corpus of European Parliament proceedings spanning twenty one languages since 1996 and developed the widely used open-source Moses statistical machine translation decoder. He wrote the textbooks Statistical Machine Translation in 2009 and Neural Machine Translation in 2020, was a finalist for the European Inventor Award in 2013, received the International Association for Machine Translation's Award of Honor in 2015, and was named an ACL Fellow in 2024.