Since the dawn of the age of computers, researchers have been pushing
the limits of available processing power to tackle the formidable
challenge of developing software that can understand ordinary human
language. At the forefront of this quest for the past fifty years,
Martin Kay has been a constant source of new algorithms that have
proven fundamental to progress in computational linguistics. Martin
Kay's Half-Century of Computational Linguistics, the premier
comprehensive collection of his works, opens a window into the growth
of this important and increasingly fruitful field of scientific
research and development.
Combining a sharp wit with the remorseless
logic of a mathematician, Kay addresses topics ranging from machine
translation to the proper design of electronic dictionaries, from
chart parsing to unification.
Kay also offers a well-informed perspective on which natural
language
processing research challenges to tackle next, and how. This book
will
be important for computational linguists and students, and
illuminating for readers with an interest in the central role of
language processing in the future of the Internet.
Martin Kay is one of the preeminent computational linguists in the
world, having helped to shape and advance this field for the past
fifty years. He is currently the Chair of the International
Committee
on Computational Linguistics, and the former Chair of the
Association
for Computational Linguistics. Born and raised in the United
Kingdom,
he received his M.A. from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1961. In
1958
he started to work at the Cambridge Language Research Unit, one of
the
earliest centers for research in what is now known as computational
linguistics. In 1961, he moved to the Rand Corporation in Santa
Monica, California, where he eventually became head of research in
linguistics and machine translation. He left Rand in 1972 to become
Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of
California, Irvine. In 1974, he moved to the Xerox Palo Alto Research
Center as a Research Fellow. In 1985, while retaining his position at
Xerox PARC, he joined the faculty of Stanford University half-time. He
is currently Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University and
Honorary Professor of Computational Linguistics at Saarland
University. He holds an honorary doctorate of Gothenburg University.
In 2005, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Association
for Computational Linguistics for his sustained role as an
intellectual leader of NLP research. His research interests include
translation, both by people and machines, and computational
linguistics algorithms, especially in the fields of morphology and
syntax.
Dan Flickinger is project manager of the Linguistic Grammars Online
Project at the Center for the Study of Language and Information,
Stanford University.
Stephan Oepen is professor in computational linguistics at the
University of Oslo and senior researcher at the Center for the Study
of Language and Information, Stanford University.
October 2010