William Aaron Woods
Encyclopedia
William A. Woods generally known as Bill Woods, is a researcher in natural language processing
, continuous speech understanding
, knowledge representation
, and knowledge-based search technology
. He is currently interested in using technology to help people organize and use information in organizations.
Woods received a Bachelor's degree from Ohio Wesleyan University
(1964) and a Master's (1965) and Ph.D. (1968) in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University
, where he then served as an Assistant Professor and later as a Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science.
Woods built one of the first natural language question answering systems (LUNAR) to answer questions about the Apollo 11
moon rocks for the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center
while he was at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At BBN, he was a Principal Scientist and manager of the Artificial Intelligence Department in the '70's and early '80's. He was the principal investigator for BBN's early work in natural language processing and knowledge representation and for its first project in continuous speech understanding. Subsequently, he was Chief Scientist for Applied Expert Systems and Principal Technologist for ON Technology
, Cambridge start-ups. In 1991, he joined Sun Microsystems
Laboratories as a Principal Scientist and Distinguished Engineer, and in 2007, he joined ITA Software
as a Distinguished Software Engineer.
Woods' 1975 paper "What's in a Link" is a widely-cited critical review of early work in semantic network
s. This paper has been cited in the context of querying and natural language processing approaches that make use of Semantic Networks and general knowledge modeling. The paper attempts to clarify notions of meaning and semantics in computational systems. Woods further elaborated on the issues and how they relate to contemporary systems in "Meaning and Links" (2007).
Woods has received many honors:
Natural language processing
Natural language processing is a field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages; it began as a branch of artificial intelligence....
, continuous speech understanding
Speech recognition
Speech recognition converts spoken words to text. The term "voice recognition" is sometimes used to refer to recognition systems that must be trained to a particular speaker—as is the case for most desktop recognition software...
, knowledge representation
Knowledge representation
Knowledge representation is an area of artificial intelligence research aimed at representing knowledge in symbols to facilitate inferencing from those knowledge elements, creating new elements of knowledge...
, and knowledge-based search technology
Search engine technology
Modern web search engines are complex software systems using the technology that has evolved over the years. There are several categories of search engine software: Web search engines , database or structured data search engines , and mixed search engines or enterprise search...
. He is currently interested in using technology to help people organize and use information in organizations.
Woods received a Bachelor's degree from Ohio Wesleyan University
Ohio Wesleyan University
Ohio Wesleyan University is a private liberal arts college in Delaware, Ohio, United States. It was founded in 1842 by Methodist leaders and Central Ohio residents as a nonsectarian institution, and is a member of the Ohio Five — a consortium of Ohio liberal arts colleges...
(1964) and a Master's (1965) and Ph.D. (1968) in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, where he then served as an Assistant Professor and later as a Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science.
Woods built one of the first natural language question answering systems (LUNAR) to answer questions about the Apollo 11
Apollo 11
In early 1969, Bill Anders accepted a job with the National Space Council effective in August 1969 and announced his retirement as an astronaut. At that point Ken Mattingly was moved from the support crew into parallel training with Anders as backup Command Module Pilot in case Apollo 11 was...
moon rocks for the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center
Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center
The Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's center for human spaceflight training, research and flight control. The center consists of a complex of 100 buildings constructed on 1,620 acres in Houston, Texas, USA...
while he was at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At BBN, he was a Principal Scientist and manager of the Artificial Intelligence Department in the '70's and early '80's. He was the principal investigator for BBN's early work in natural language processing and knowledge representation and for its first project in continuous speech understanding. Subsequently, he was Chief Scientist for Applied Expert Systems and Principal Technologist for ON Technology
ON Technology
ON Technology was a software company in the United States. It was formed by Mitch Kapor after his departure from Lotus Software. The original plan of the business was to build an object-oriented PC desktop environment providing a variety of applications...
, Cambridge start-ups. In 1991, he joined Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
Laboratories as a Principal Scientist and Distinguished Engineer, and in 2007, he joined ITA Software
ITA Software
ITA Software is a travel industry software company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company was founded by computer scientists from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1996. On July 1, 2010 ITA agreed to be acquired by Google. On April 8th, 2011 the US Department of Justice approved the...
as a Distinguished Software Engineer.
Woods' 1975 paper "What's in a Link" is a widely-cited critical review of early work in semantic network
Semantic network
A semantic network is a network which represents semantic relations among concepts. This is often used as a form of knowledge representation. It is a directed or undirected graph consisting of vertices, which represent concepts, and edges.- History :...
s. This paper has been cited in the context of querying and natural language processing approaches that make use of Semantic Networks and general knowledge modeling. The paper attempts to clarify notions of meaning and semantics in computational systems. Woods further elaborated on the issues and how they relate to contemporary systems in "Meaning and Links" (2007).
Woods has received many honors:
- 1978, Fulbright Fellowship
- 1990, Fellow of the American Association for Artificial IntelligenceAmerican Association for Artificial IntelligenceThe Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence or AAAI is an international, nonprofit, scientific society devoted to advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines...
- 1992, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of ScienceAmerican Association for the Advancement of ScienceThe American Association for the Advancement of Science is an international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsibility, and supporting scientific education and science outreach for the...
- 2010, 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
Selected works
- "Transition Network Grammars for Natural Language Analysis," Communications of the ACM 13:10, October 1970. Reprinted in Yoh-Han Pao and George W. Ernest (eds.), Tutorial: Context-Directed Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence Techniques for Information Processing. IEEE Computer Society Press, Silver Spring, MD, 1982. Also reprinted in Barbara Grosz, Karen Sparck Jones and Bonnie Webber (eds.), Readings in Natural Language Processing, San Mateo: Morgan Kaufmann, 1986.
- "The Lunar Sciences Natural Language Information System: Final Report" (with R. M. Kaplan and B.L. Nash-Webber), BBN Report No. 2378, Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge, MA 02138, June, 1972. (Available from NTIS as N72-28984.)
- Speech-Understanding Systems: Final Report of a Study Group, (with A. Newell, Chairman, et al .), North-Holland/American Elsevier, 1973.
- "An Experimental parsing System for Transition Network Grammars", in R. Rustin (ed.), Natural Language Processing, New York: Algorithmics Press, 1973.
- "Progress in Natural Language Understanding: An Application to Lunar Geology," AFIPS Conference Proceedings 42 (1973 National Computer Conference and Exposition).
- "What's in a Link: Foundations for Semantic Networks" in D. Bobrow and A. Collins (eds.), Representation and Understanding: Studies in Cognitive Science, New York: Academic Press, 1975. Reprinted in R. Brachman and H. Levesque (eds.), Readings in Knowledge Representation, San Mateo: Morgan Kaufmann, 1985. Also reprinted in Allan Collins and Edward E. Smith (eds.), Readings in Cognitive Science, San Mateo: Morgan Kaufmann, 1988.
- "Procedural Semantics as a Theory of Meaning" in A. Joshi, B. L. Webber and I. Sag (eds.), Elements of Discourse Understanding, Cambridge University Press, 1981.
- "Optimal Search Strategies for Speech Understanding Control", Artificial Intelligence 18:3:295-326, May 1982.
- "What's Important About Knowledge Representation?," IEEE Computer 16:10, October 1983.
- "Artificial Intelligence", in Lisa Taylor (ed.), The Phenomenon of Change, New York: Rizzoli, 1984.
- Computer Speech Processing, (ed. with Frank Fallside), Prentice-Hall International (UK) Ltd., 1985.
- "Important Issues in Knowledge Representation," Proceedings of the IEEE 74:10:1322-1334. October 1986. Reprinted in Peter G. Raeth (ed.), Expert Systems: A Software Methodology for Modern Applications, Los Alamitos:IEEE Computer Society Press, 1990, pp 180-204.
- "Don't Blame the Tool," Computational Intelligence 3:3:228-237, August 1987.
- "Understanding Subsumption and Taxonomy: A Framework for Progress," in John Sowa (ed.), Principles of Semantic Networks: Explorations in the Representation of Knowledge, San Mateo:Morgan Kaufmann, 1991, pp 45–94.
- "The KL-ONE Family," (with James Schmolze), Computers & Mathematics with Applications 23:2-5:133-177, January–March 1992, special issue on Semantic Networks in Artificial Intelligence , Part 1. Also reprinted in Fritz Lehmann (ed), Semantic Networks in Artificial Intelligence, Pergamon Press, 1992, pp 133-177.
- "Conceptual Indexing: A Better Way to Organize Knowledge," Technical Report SMLI TR-97-61, Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Mountain View, CA, April, 1997.
- "Linguistic Knowledge can Improve Information Retrieval," with Lawrence A. Bookman, Ann Houston, Robert J. Kuhns, Paul Martin, and Stephen Green, Proceedings of ANLP-2000, Seattle, WA, May 1–3, 2000, (Final version with author's introduction is reprinted in Sun Labs' anniversary volume, Sun Microsystems Laboratories: The First Ten Years, 1991-2001.)
- "Meaning and Links: a Semantic Odyssey," AI Magazine 28:4 (Winter 2007). full text
External links
- Personal Homepage
- http://www.lotico.com/index.php/What%27s_in_a_Link What's in a Link Revisited, a presentation to Lotico the Cambridge Semantic Web group on March 9, 2010
- http://www.fask.uni-mainz.de/lk/videoarchive/videos/2010-07-13-acl2010-william-woods.html ACL 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award Presentation
- http://labs.oracle.com/people/william.woods/ (Former) Sun Labs page