Martin Kay

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.

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 computational 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.

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 translation.

• His honors include an honorary Doctor of Philosophy from Gothenburg University and the 2005 Association for Computational Linguistics' Lifetime Achievement Award. He is the permanent chairman of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics.

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 Jones), Academic Press, 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 Press, 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 Processing, 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

• Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Saarland University
• Stanford University

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

Preceded by Karen Spärck Jones

ACL Lifetime Achievement Award 2005

Succeeded by Eva Hajičová

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Name	Kay, Martin
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