Martin Kay
Encyclopedia
Martin Kay is a computer scientist
known especially for his work in 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
, USA, 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
.
In the autumn, he generally teaches 182/282 "Human and Machine Translation" described in the catalog as follows:
The process of translation by professional and amateur translators, and by existing and proposed machine-translation systems; what each might learn from the other.
Prerequisite: advanced knowledge of a foreign language.
Recently, he has been teaching a similar course in the first ten weeks of the summer quarter at the University of the Saarland.
In the winter, at Stanford, he teaches 183/283 "Programming and Algorithms for Natural Language Processing". It is describes as follows:
Construction of computer programs for linguistic processes such as string search, morphological, syntactic, and semantic analysis and generation, and simple machine translation. Emphasis is on the algorithms that have proved most useful for solving such problems.
His main interests are translation, both by people and machines, and computational linguistic algorithms, especially in the fields of morphology and syntax.
linguistics, and the notion of unification in linguistics generally.
With Ron Kaplan
, he pioneered research and application development in finite-state morphology. He has been a longtime contributor to, and critic of, work on machine translation. In his seminal paper "The Proper Place of Men and Machines in Language Translation," Kay argued for MT systems that were tightly integrated in the human translation process. He was reviewer and critic of EUROTRA, Verbmobil, and many other MT projects.
Kay is former Chair of the Association of Computational Linguistics and President of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics
. He was a Research Fellow at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center until 2002. He holds an
honorary doctorate of Gothenburg University
. This year, Kay received the lifetime Achievement Award of the Association for Computational Linguistics for his sustained role as an intellectual leader of NLP research.
Computer scientist
A computer scientist is a scientist who has acquired knowledge of computer science, the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their application in computer systems....
known especially for his work in computational linguistics
Computational linguistics
Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective....
.
Born and raised in the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
, he received his M.A. from Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Trinity has more members than any other college in Cambridge or Oxford, with around 700 undergraduates, 430 graduates, and over 170 Fellows...
, 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
Santa Monica, California
Santa Monica is a beachfront city in western Los Angeles County, California, US. Situated on Santa Monica Bay, it is surrounded on three sides by the city of Los Angeles — Pacific Palisades on the northwest, Brentwood on the north, West Los Angeles on the northeast, Mar Vista on the east, and...
, USA, 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
University of California, Irvine
The University of California, Irvine , founded in 1965, is one of the ten campuses of the University of California, located in Irvine, California, USA...
. 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
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
half-time. He is currently Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University and Honorary Professor of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University
Saarland University
Saarland University is a university located in Saarbrücken, the capital of the German state of Saarland, and Homburg. It was founded in 1948 in Homburg in co-operation with France and is organized in 8 faculties that cover all major fields of science...
.
Life
He was born in Great Britain and he studied linguistics and computational linguistics at Trinity College in Cambridge.In the autumn, he generally teaches 182/282 "Human and Machine Translation" described in the catalog as follows:
The process of translation by professional and amateur translators, and by existing and proposed machine-translation systems; what each might learn from the other.
Prerequisite: advanced knowledge of a foreign language.
Recently, he has been teaching a similar course in the first ten weeks of the summer quarter at the University of the Saarland.
In the winter, at Stanford, he teaches 183/283 "Programming and Algorithms for Natural Language Processing". It is describes as follows:
Construction of computer programs for linguistic processes such as string search, morphological, syntactic, and semantic analysis and generation, and simple machine translation. Emphasis is on the algorithms that have proved most useful for solving such problems.
His main interests are translation, both by people and machines, and computational linguistic algorithms, especially in the fields of morphology and syntax.
Work
Kay worked at Rand Corporation, the University of California at Irvine and XEROX PARC. Kay is one of the pioneers of computational linguistics and machine translation. He was responsible for introducing the notion of chart parsing in computationallinguistics, and the notion of unification in linguistics generally.
With Ron Kaplan
Ronald Kaplan
Ronald M. Kaplan is Chief Scientist and a Principal Researcher at the Powerset division of Microsoft Bing. He is also a Consulting Professor in the Linguistics Department at Stanford University and a Principal of Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information...
, he pioneered research and application development in finite-state morphology. He has been a longtime contributor to, and critic of, work on machine translation. In his seminal paper "The Proper Place of Men and Machines in Language Translation," Kay argued for MT systems that were tightly integrated in the human translation process. He was reviewer and critic of EUROTRA, Verbmobil, and many other MT projects.
Kay is former Chair of the Association of Computational Linguistics and President of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
The International Committee on Computational Linguistics was founded by Dr. David Hays of the RAND Corporation in 1965 to promote biennial conferences on Computational Linguistics, now known by the acronym COLING. The most recent COLING was in Beijing in 2010. Its current President is Professor...
. He was a Research Fellow at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center until 2002. He holds an
honorary doctorate of Gothenburg University
Gothenburg University
The University of Gothenburg is a university in Sweden's second largest city, Gothenburg.- Character :The University of Gothenburg is the third-oldest Swedish university, and with 24,900 full-time students it is also among the largest universities in the Nordic countries...
. This year, Kay received the lifetime Achievement Award of the Association for Computational Linguistics for his sustained role as an intellectual leader of NLP research.
Achievements and honors
- His achievements include the development of chart parsing and functional unification grammar and major contributions to the application of finite state automata in computational phonology and morphology. He is also regarded as a leading authority on machine translationMachine translationMachine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another.On a basic...
.
- His honors include an honorary Doctor of Philosophy from Gothenburg UniversityGothenburg UniversityThe University of Gothenburg is a university in Sweden's second largest city, Gothenburg.- Character :The University of Gothenburg is the third-oldest Swedish university, and with 24,900 full-time students it is also among the largest universities in the Nordic countries...
and the 2005 Association for Computational LinguisticsAssociation for Computational LinguisticsThe Association for Computational Linguistics is the international scientific and professional society for people working on problems involving natural language and computation. An annual meeting is held each summer in locations where significant computational linguistics research is carried out...
' Lifetime Achievement Award. He is the permanent chairman of the International Committee on Computational LinguisticsInternational Committee on Computational LinguisticsThe International Committee on Computational Linguistics was founded by Dr. David Hays of the RAND Corporation in 1965 to promote biennial conferences on Computational Linguistics, now known by the acronym COLING. The most recent COLING was in Beijing in 2010. Its current President is Professor...
.
Contributions
- «A Life in Language». A speech given in acknowledgement of the Life-time Achievement Award at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 27 June, 2005. http://www.stanford.edu/~mjkay/LifeOfLanguage.pdf
- String Alignment Using Suffix Trees. A paper about the possible use of suffix trees for aligning texts and their translations. http://www.stanford.edu/~mjkay/CYCLING.pdf
- Some unfinished musings on the nature of translation.Here are some unfinished musings on the nature of translation. http://www.stanford.edu/~mjkay/CurrentState.pdf
- Some half-baked thoughts on language models in statistical NLP on which I need some help. http://www.stanford.edu/~mjkay/language_models.pdf
- His 1994 paper on "Regular Models of Phonological Rule Systems". Computational Linguistics 20(3):331-378" with Ronald Kaplan. http://www.stanford.edu/~mjkay/Kaplan%26Kay.pdf
Books
- Linguistics and Information Science (with Karen Spärck JonesKaren Spärck JonesKaren Spärck Jones FBA was a British computer scientist.Karen Spärck Jones was born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England. Her father was Owen Jones, a lecturer in chemistry, and her mother was Ida Spärck, a Norwegian who moved to Britain during World War II...
), Academic PressAcademic PressAcademic Press is an academic book publisher. Originally independent, it was acquired by Harcourt, Brace & World in 1969. Reed Elsevier bought Harcourt in 2000, and Academic Press is now an imprint of Elsevier....
, 1973. - Natural Language in Information Science (edited with D. E. Walker and Hans Karlgren), Skriptor, Stockholm, 1977
- Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog (with John Mark Gawron and Peter Norwig), CSLI, Stanford, California, 1994.
- An Introduction to Machine Translation. W. John Hutchins and Harold L. Somers. London: Academic Press, 1992.
- Handbook of Computational Linguistics. Ruslan Mitkov (ed.). Oxford University PressOxford University PressOxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the Vice-Chancellor known as the Delegates of the Press. They are headed by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as...
, 2003. (Introduction.)
Selected papers
- “Rules of Interpretation--An Approach to the Problem of Computation in the Semantics of Natural Language”, in Proceedings of the Second International Congress of the International Federation for Information Processing, 1962.
- “A Parsing Procedure” Proceedings of the Second International Congress of the International Federation for Information Processing, 1962.
- “A General Procedure for Rewriting Strings”, paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics, Bloomington, Indiana, 1964.
- The Logic of Cognate Recognition in Historical Linguistics, RM-4224-PR, Santa Monica, The RAND Corporation, July 1964.
- A Parsing Program for Categorial Grammars, RM-4283-PR, Santa Monica, The RAND Corporation, August, 1964.
- The Tabular Parser: A Parsing Program for Phrase-Structure and Dependency, RM-4933-PR, Santa Monica, The RAND Corporation, July, 1966.
- The Computer System to Aid the Linguistic Field Worker, P-4095, Santa Monica, The RAND Corporation, May, 1969.
- The MIND System: The Morphological Analysis Program, RM-6265/2-PR, Santa Monica, The RAND Corporation, April, 1970. (with Gary R. Martins).
- “Automatic Translation of Natural Languages” in Language as a Human Problem: Daedalus, 1973.
- “Functional Unification Grammar: A Formalism for Machine Translation” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 84), The Association for Computational Linguistics, 1984.
- “Parsing in Free Word Order Languages” (with Lauri Karttunen), in Dowty, David R., Lauri Karttunen, and Arnold M. Zwicky, Natural Language Parsing, Cambridge University Press, 1985.
- “Unification in Grammar”, in Dahl, V., and P. Saint-Dizier, Natural Language Understanding and Logic Programming, North Holland, 1985.
- “Theoretical Issues in the Design of a Translator's Work Station”, Proceedings of the IBM workshop on Computers and Translation, Copenhagen.
- “Regular Models of Phonological Rule Systems” (with R. M. Kaplan), Computational Linguistics 20:3 (September, 1994. With R. M. Kaplan).
- “Substring Alignment Using Suffix Trees”. Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text ProcessingInternational Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational LinguisticsCICLing is the name of an annual conference on natural language processing and computational linguistics . The first CICLing conference was held in 2000. The conference is attended by about hundred of NLP and CL researchers and students every year...
, Springer, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2004.
Course readings
- Disjunctive Unification http://www.stanford.edu/~mjkay/DisjunctiveUnification.pdf
- Functional Uncertainty http://www.stanford.edu/~mjkay/FunctionalUncertainty.pdf
- HPSG1 http://www.stanford.edu/~mjkay/pollard-foundations.pdf
- HPSG2 http://www.stanford.edu/~mjkay/levine03.pdf
- HPSG Generation http://www.stanford.edu/~mjkay/Shieber.pdf
- CCG http://www.stanford.edu/~mjkay/Steedman%26Baldridge.pdf
- Typed Features http://www.stanford.edu/~mjkay/Copestake.pdf
- Dependency http://www.stanford.edu/~mjkay/covington.pdf
Awards
- He has an honorary professorship at the University of the Saarland on honorary doctorates from the universities of Gothenburg and Geneva.
- He also won the 2005 Lifetime Achievement Award, of the ACL. A Life of Language
See also
- LinguisticsLinguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
- Computational LinguisticsComputational linguisticsComputational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective....
- Saarland UniversitySaarland UniversitySaarland University is a university located in Saarbrücken, the capital of the German state of Saarland, and Homburg. It was founded in 1948 in Homburg in co-operation with France and is organized in 8 faculties that cover all major fields of science...
- Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityThe Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
External links
- Stanford home page
- University of Saarland home page
- ACL Lifetime Achievement Award citation
- "A Life of Language" — ACL Lifetime Award Acceptance Speech — Martin Kay outlining his work in Computational Linguistics (13 pages)
- Lecture announcement with biographical note
- An interview (video and audio) with Martin Kay at the Oxford Internet Institute, June 18, 2009