At the end of the 1980s, there was a large surge in a number of novel methods for machine translation. One system was developed at IBM that was based on statistical methods. Makoto Nagao and his group used methods based on large numbers of translation examples, a technique that is now termed example-based machine translation. A defining feature of both of these approaches was the neglect of syntactic and semantic rules and reliance instead on the manipulation of large text corpora.