Henry Kucera

Henry Kucera (originally Jindřich Kučera; born 1925) is a Czech linguist who was a pioneer in corpus linguistics and linguistic software.

Kucera was born in the former Czechoslovakia. When the Communists came to power in 1948, his studies in philosophy and linguistics were interrupted.

In the 1950s, Kucera found his way to Brown University, in the United States, where he was able to further pursue his interest in linguistics (he remained there for the rest of his career). At Brown, he became interested in the computational analysis of human language, though at the time there were scarcely any tools for this type of research.

In 1963-1964, Kucera collaborated with W. Nelson Francis to create the Brown Corpus of Standard American English, generally known as the "Brown Corpus". This was a carefully compiled selection of current American English as published during the year 1961 in 1000 sources on a wide variety of subjects. It has been very widely used in computational linguistics, and was for many years among the most-cited resources in the field. Kucera and Francis themselves subjected it to a variety of computational analyses from which derived their classic work "Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English" (1967), followed by Francis and Kucera's "Frequency Analysis of English Usage: Lexicon and Grammar" (1982).

Shortly thereafter, Boston publisher Houghton-Mifflin approached Kucera to supply a million word, three-line citation base for its new "American Heritage Dictionary". This ground-breaking new dictionary, which first appeared in 1969, was the first dictionary to be compiled using corpus linguistics for word frequency and other information.

Kucera wrote one of the first spell checkers over Christmas, 1981, in PL/I for VAX machines, at the behest of Digital Equipment Corporation. It was a simple, rapid spelling verifier. Kucera later oversaw the development of Houghton-Mifflin’s Correct Text grammar checker, which also drew heavily on statistical techniques for analysis.

External links

* [http://www.lim.nl/monitor/kucera.html Profile of Henry Kucera] (from "Language Industry Monitor")