Yorick Wilks
Encyclopedia
Yorick Wilks FBCS is a British Computer Scientist who is Professor of Artificial Intelligence (Emeritus) at the University of Sheffield
, a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute
, and a Senior Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.
__FORCETOC__
, before attending Pembroke College, Cambridge
,where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1968 under Professor R. B. Braithwaite for his thesis Argument and Proof; he was an early pioneer in meaning-based approaches to the understanding of natural language content by computers. His main early contribution in the 1970s was called "Preference Semantics" (Wilks, 1973; Wilks and Fass, 1992), an algorithmic method for assigning the "most coherent" interpretation to a sentence in terms of having the maximum number of internal preferences of its parts (normally verbs or adjectives) satisfied. That early work was hand-coded with semantic entries (of the order of some hundreds) as was normal at the time, but since then has led to the empirical determinations of preferences (chiefly of English verbs) in the 1980s and 1990s.
A key component of the notion of preference in semantics was that the interpretation of an utterance is not a well- or ill-formed notion, as was argued in Chomskyan approaches
, such as those of Jerry Fodor
and Jerrold Katz
. It was rather that a semantic interpretation was the best available, even though some preferences might not be satisfied. So, in "The machine answered the question with a low whine" the agent of "answer" does not satisfy that verb's preference for a human answerer—which would cause it to be deemed ill-formed by Fodor and Katz—but is accepted as sub-optimal or metaphorical, and now, of course, conventional. The function of the algorithm is not to determine well-formedness at all but to make the optimal selection of word-senses to participate in the overall interpretation. Thus, in "The Pole answered..." the system will always select the human sense of the agent and not the inanimate one if it gives a more coherent interpretation overall.
Preference Semantics is thus some of the earliest computational work—with programs run at Systems Development Corporation in Santa Monica in 1967 in LISP on an IBM360—in the now established field of word sense disambiguation
. This approach was used in the first operational machine translation
system based principally on meaning structures and built by Wilks at Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the early 1970s (Wilks, 1973) at the same time and place as Roger Schank
was applying his "Conceptual Dependency" approach to machine translation. The LISP code of Wilks' system was in The Computer Museum, Boston
.
Yorick Wilks has been elected a fellow of the American and European Associations for Artificial Intelligence, of the British Computer Society
, a member of the UK Computing Research Committee, and a permanent member of ICCL, the International Committee on Computational Linguistics
. He is Professor of Artificial Intelligence
at the University of Sheffield
and a Senior Research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute
. In 1991 he received a Defense Advanced Projects Agency grant on interlingual pragmatics-based machine translation and in 1994 he received a grant by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in order to investigate in the field of Large-scale information extraction (LaSIE); in the following years he would obtained more grants to carry on exploring the field of information extraction (AVENTINUS, ECRAN, PASTA...). In the 1990s Professor Wilks also became interested in modelling human-computer dialogue and the team led by David Levy
and him as chief researcher won the Loebner Prize
in 1997. He was the founding Director of the EU funded Companions Project on creating long-term computer companions for people. At his Festschrift
in 2007 at the British Computer Society
in London a volume of his own papers was presented along with a volume of essays in his honor. He was awarded the Antonio Zampolli prize in honor of his lifetime work at the LREC
'2008 conference on May 28, 2008, and the Lifetime Achievement Award at the ACL
'2008 conference on June 18, 2008.
In 2009, he was awarded the British Computer Society
's Lovelace Medal
, its annual award for research achievement, and was awarded the Fellowship of the Association for Computing Machinery
.
In 1998, Wilks became head of the Department of Computer Science of the University of Sheffield, where he had started working in the year 1993 as Professor of Artificial Intelligence, a post he still holds. In 1993 he became the founding director of the Institute of Language, Speech and Hearing (ILASH). Dr Wilks also set up the Natural Language Processing Group of the University of Sheffield. In 1994 he (along with Rob Gaizauskas and Hamish Cunningham) designed GATE
, an advanced NLP architecture that has been widely distributed.
University of Sheffield
The University of Sheffield is a research university based in the city of Sheffield in South Yorkshire, England. It is one of the original 'red brick' universities and is a member of the Russell Group of leading research intensive universities...
, a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute
Oxford Internet Institute
The Oxford Internet Institute is a multi-disciplinary institute based at the University of Oxford, England, and housed in buildings owned by Balliol College, Oxford. It is devoted to the study of the societal implications of the Internet, with the aim of shaping research, policy and practice in...
, and a Senior Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.
__FORCETOC__
Biography
Wilks was educated at Torquay Boys' Grammar SchoolTorquay Boys' Grammar School
Torquay Boys' Grammar School is a selective boys grammar school in Torquay, Devon, England.-Admissions:, it has approximately 1,058 students. The school was founded in 1904 and celebrated its centenary in 2004...
, before attending Pembroke College, Cambridge
Pembroke College, Cambridge
Pembroke College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England.The college has over seven hundred students and fellows, and is the third oldest college of the university. Physically, it is one of the university's larger colleges, with buildings from almost every century since its...
,where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1968 under Professor R. B. Braithwaite for his thesis Argument and Proof; he was an early pioneer in meaning-based approaches to the understanding of natural language content by computers. His main early contribution in the 1970s was called "Preference Semantics" (Wilks, 1973; Wilks and Fass, 1992), an algorithmic method for assigning the "most coherent" interpretation to a sentence in terms of having the maximum number of internal preferences of its parts (normally verbs or adjectives) satisfied. That early work was hand-coded with semantic entries (of the order of some hundreds) as was normal at the time, but since then has led to the empirical determinations of preferences (chiefly of English verbs) in the 1980s and 1990s.
A key component of the notion of preference in semantics was that the interpretation of an utterance is not a well- or ill-formed notion, as was argued in Chomskyan approaches
Generative grammar
In theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences...
, such as those of Jerry Fodor
Jerry Fodor
Jerry Alan Fodor is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He holds the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and is the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he has laid the groundwork for the...
and Jerrold Katz
Jerrold Katz
Jerrold J. Katz was an American philosopher and linguist.After receiving a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University in 1960, Katz became a Research Associate in Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961. He was appointed Assistant Professor of Philosophy there in 1963,...
. It was rather that a semantic interpretation was the best available, even though some preferences might not be satisfied. So, in "The machine answered the question with a low whine" the agent of "answer" does not satisfy that verb's preference for a human answerer—which would cause it to be deemed ill-formed by Fodor and Katz—but is accepted as sub-optimal or metaphorical, and now, of course, conventional. The function of the algorithm is not to determine well-formedness at all but to make the optimal selection of word-senses to participate in the overall interpretation. Thus, in "The Pole answered..." the system will always select the human sense of the agent and not the inanimate one if it gives a more coherent interpretation overall.
Preference Semantics is thus some of the earliest computational work—with programs run at Systems Development Corporation in Santa Monica in 1967 in LISP on an IBM360—in the now established field of word sense disambiguation
Word sense disambiguation
In computational linguistics, word-sense disambiguation is an open problem of natural language processing, which governs the process of identifying which sense of a word is used in a sentence, when the word has multiple meanings...
. This approach was used in the first operational machine translation
Machine translation
Machine 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...
system based principally on meaning structures and built by Wilks at Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the early 1970s (Wilks, 1973) at the same time and place as Roger Schank
Roger Schank
Roger Schank is an American artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist, learning scientist, educational reformer, and entrepreneur.-Academic career:...
was applying his "Conceptual Dependency" approach to machine translation. The LISP code of Wilks' system was in The Computer Museum, Boston
The Computer Museum, Boston
The Computer Museum was a Boston, Massachusetts museum that opened in 1979 and operated in three different locations until 1999. It was once referred to as TCM and is sometimes called the Boston Computer Museum....
.
Yorick Wilks has been elected a fellow of the American and European Associations for Artificial Intelligence, of the British Computer Society
British Computer Society
The British Computer Society, is a professional body and a learned society that represents those working in Information Technology in the United Kingdom and internationally...
, a member of the UK Computing Research Committee, and a permanent member of ICCL, 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 is Professor of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
at the University of Sheffield
University of Sheffield
The University of Sheffield is a research university based in the city of Sheffield in South Yorkshire, England. It is one of the original 'red brick' universities and is a member of the Russell Group of leading research intensive universities...
and a Senior Research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute
Oxford Internet Institute
The Oxford Internet Institute is a multi-disciplinary institute based at the University of Oxford, England, and housed in buildings owned by Balliol College, Oxford. It is devoted to the study of the societal implications of the Internet, with the aim of shaping research, policy and practice in...
. In 1991 he received a Defense Advanced Projects Agency grant on interlingual pragmatics-based machine translation and in 1994 he received a grant by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in order to investigate in the field of Large-scale information extraction (LaSIE); in the following years he would obtained more grants to carry on exploring the field of information extraction (AVENTINUS, ECRAN, PASTA...). In the 1990s Professor Wilks also became interested in modelling human-computer dialogue and the team led by David Levy
David Levy (chess player)
David Neil Laurence Levy , is a Scottish International Master of chess, a businessman noted for his involvement with computer chess and artificial intelligence, and the founder of the Computer Olympiads and the Mind Sports Olympiads. He has written more than 40 books on chess and computers.- Life...
and him as chief researcher won the Loebner Prize
Loebner prize
The Loebner Prize is an annual competition in artificial intelligence that awards prizes to the chatterbot considered by the judges to be the most human-like. The format of the competition is that of a standard Turing test. In each round, a human judge simultaneously holds textual conversations...
in 1997. He was the founding Director of the EU funded Companions Project on creating long-term computer companions for people. At his Festschrift
Festschrift
In academia, a Festschrift , is a book honoring a respected person, especially an academic, and presented during his or her lifetime. The term, borrowed from German, could be translated as celebration publication or celebratory writing...
in 2007 at the British Computer Society
British Computer Society
The British Computer Society, is a professional body and a learned society that represents those working in Information Technology in the United Kingdom and internationally...
in London a volume of his own papers was presented along with a volume of essays in his honor. He was awarded the Antonio Zampolli prize in honor of his lifetime work at the LREC
LREC
The International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation is a biennial conference organised by the European Language Resources Association with the support of institutions and organisations involved in Natural language processing....
'2008 conference on May 28, 2008, and the Lifetime Achievement Award at the ACL
Association for Computational Linguistics
The 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...
'2008 conference on June 18, 2008.
In 2009, he was awarded the British Computer Society
British Computer Society
The British Computer Society, is a professional body and a learned society that represents those working in Information Technology in the United Kingdom and internationally...
's Lovelace Medal
Lovelace Medal
The Lovelace Medal, established by the British Computer Society in 1998, is presented to individuals who have advanced Information Systems or added significantly to their understanding....
, its annual award for research achievement, and was awarded the Fellowship of the Association for Computing Machinery
Association for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...
.
In 1998, Wilks became head of the Department of Computer Science of the University of Sheffield, where he had started working in the year 1993 as Professor of Artificial Intelligence, a post he still holds. In 1993 he became the founding director of the Institute of Language, Speech and Hearing (ILASH). Dr Wilks also set up the Natural Language Processing Group of the University of Sheffield. In 1994 he (along with Rob Gaizauskas and Hamish Cunningham) designed GATE
General Architecture for Text Engineering
General Architecture for Text Engineering or GATE is a Java suite of tools originally developed at the University of Sheffield beginning in 1995 and now used worldwide by a wide community of scientists, companies, teachers and students for all sorts of natural language processing tasks, including...
, an advanced NLP architecture that has been widely distributed.
Awards
Yorick Wilks has received many awards some of which we highlight here:- (2009) Elected Fellow of the Association for Computing MachineryAssociation for Computing MachineryThe Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...
- (2009) Lovelace MedalLovelace MedalThe Lovelace Medal, established by the British Computer Society in 1998, is presented to individuals who have advanced Information Systems or added significantly to their understanding....
by the British Computer SocietyBritish Computer SocietyThe British Computer Society, is a professional body and a learned society that represents those working in Information Technology in the United Kingdom and internationally... - (2008) Zampolli Prize (ELRAELRAA not-for-profit organisation, the European Language Resources Association association is established under the law of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg...
, awarded at LRECLRECThe International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation is a biennial conference organised by the European Language Resources Association with the support of institutions and organisations involved in Natural language processing....
in Marrakech, Morocco) - (2008) Lifetime Achievement Award (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...
, in Columbus) - (2006) Visiting Professor, University of OxfordUniversity of OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
- (2004) Elected to UK Computing Research Committee
- (2004) Elected Fellow, British Computer Society
- (2003) Visiting Fellow, Oxford Internet InstituteOxford Internet InstituteThe Oxford Internet Institute is a multi-disciplinary institute based at the University of Oxford, England, and housed in buildings owned by Balliol College, Oxford. It is devoted to the study of the societal implications of the Internet, with the aim of shaping research, policy and practice in...
- (1998) Elected Fellow of European Association for Artificial Intelligence
- (1997) Elected Fellow, EPSRCEngineering and Physical Sciences Research CouncilThe Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council is a British Research Council that provides government funding for grants to undertake research and postgraduate degrees in engineering and the physical sciences , mainly to universities in the United Kingdom...
College of Computing - (1991) Visiting Fellow, Trinity Hall, CambridgeTrinity Hall, CambridgeTrinity Hall is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. It is the fifth-oldest college of the university, having been founded in 1350 by William Bateman, Bishop of Norwich.- Foundation :...
- (1991) Elected 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...
- (1983) Royal SocietyRoyal SocietyThe Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, known simply as the Royal Society, is a learned society for science, and is possibly the oldest such society in existence. Founded in November 1660, it was granted a Royal Charter by King Charles II as the "Royal Society of London"...
Travel Fellowship - (1983) Commonwealth of Australia Visiting Professor
- (1981) Visiting Sloan Fellow, University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
- (1980) Invited Participant in the NobelNobel PrizeThe Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
Symposium on Language, Stockholm - (1979) NATO Senior Scientist Fellowship
- (1979) Visiting Sloan Fellow, Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
- (1975) SRC Senior Visiting Fellowship, University of EdinburghUniversity of EdinburghThe University of Edinburgh, founded in 1583, is a public research university located in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The university is deeply embedded in the fabric of the city, with many of the buildings in the historic Old Town belonging to the university...
Conferences
Yorick Wilks has been invited several times as a speaker in many conferences. Here we have selected some of the most recent:- Alpbach Forum on the Future of the Internet, Austria 2009
- Biennial Wisbey Lecture, Kings College, London 2009
- Oxford e-Research Centre (OeRC), 2009.
- DIALOG'08, Moscow, 2008.
- Assn. Computational Linguistics, Columbus, US, 2008.
- LREC'08, Marrakech, Morocco, 2008.
- International Applied Linguistics Congress, Santiago de Cuba, 2007.
- NLUCS'07, Madiera, 2007.
- RANLP, Borovets, Bulgaria, 2007.
- International Pragmatics Conference, Gothenburg, 2007.
Membership
Yorick Wilks is an active member of the following associations:- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Society for the Study of AI and Simulation of Behaviour
- Association for Computing Machinery
- Cognitive Science Society
- British Society for the Philosophy of Science
- American Association for Artificial Intelligence
- Aristotelean Society
Books
- Wilks, Y. Machine Translation: its scope and limits. Springer. http://www.springer.com/computer/artificial/book/978-0-387-72773-8?detailsPage=contentItemPage&CIPageCounter=603710
- Wilks, Y (ed.) (2010), Close Engagements with Artificial Companions: Key Social, Psychological and Design issues. John Benjamins; Amsterdam
- Wilks, Y., Brewster, C. (2009) Natural Language Processing as a Foundation of the Semantic Web. Now Press: London.
- Wilks, Y. (2007) Words and Intelligence I, Selected papers by Yorick Wilks. In K. Ahmad, C. Brewster & M. Stevenson (eds.), Springer: Dordrecht.
- Wilks, Y. (ed. and with introduction and commentaries). (2006) Language, cohesion and form: selected papers of Margaret Masterman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Wilks, Y., Nirenburg, S., Somers, H. (eds.) (2003) Readings in Machine Translation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Wilks, Y.(ed.). (1999) Machine Conversations. Kluwer: New York.
- Wilks, Y., Slator, B., Guthrie, L. (1996) Electric Words: dictionaries, computers and meanings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Wilks, Y., Ballim, A. (1991) Artificial Believers. Norwood, NJ: Erlbaum.
- Wilks, Y.(ed.). (1990) Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing. Norwood, NJ: Erlbaum.
- Wilks, Y., Partridge, D. (eds. plus three YW chapters and an introduction). (1990) The Foundations of Artificial Intelligence: a sourcebook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Wilks, Y., Sparck-Jones, K.(eds.). (1984) Automatic Natural Language Processing, paperback edition. New York: Wiley. Originally published by Ellis Horwood.
- Wilks, Y., Charniak, E. (eds and principal authors). (1976) Computational Semantics---an Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Understanding. Amsterdam: North-Holland. Reprinted in Russian, in the series Progress in Linguistics, Moscow, 1981.
- Wilks, Y. (1972) Grammar, Meaning and the Machine Analysis of Language. London and Boston: Routledge.
See also
- Artificial intelligenceArtificial intelligenceArtificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
- Computational linguisticsComputational linguisticsComputational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective....
- Natural language processingNatural language processingNatural 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....
External links
- Yorick Wilks' profile at the University of Sheffield DCS
- Yorick Wilks' subsite at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
- Yorick Wilks giving a lecture at the Oxford Internet Institute
- A seminar by Yorick Wilks at the Brandeis University (Department of Computer Science)
- Lecture by Professor Yorick Wilks
- Yorick Wilks at the Oxford Internet Institute (University of Oxford)