- Ronald Kaplan
Ronald M. Kaplan is Chief Technology and Science Officer at Powerset, Inc. 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 (CSLI). He was formerly a Research Fellow at thePalo Alto Research Center (formerly the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center), where he was the manager of research in Natural Language Theory and Technology.He received his
Ph.D. inSocial Psychology fromHarvard University in 1975. As a graduate student he investigated how explicit computational models ofgrammar , particularly Augmented Transition Networks, could be embedded in models of human language performance, and he wrote the grammar for the LUNAR system, the first large-scale ATN grammar of English. He also developed the notions of consumer-producer and active-chart parsing. He designed (in collaboration withJoan Bresnan ) the formal theory ofLexical Functional Grammar and produced its initial computational implementation. He developed (withMartin Kay ) the mathematical, linguistic, and computational concepts that underlie the use of finite-state phonological and morphological descriptions.He helped to embed finite-state methods in a wide range of commercial products offered by Xerox and by several Xerox spin-off companies:
Microlytics ,Inxight , andScansoft . In the 1980s he served as Chief Scientist of Microlytics. He holds over 30 patents for inventions in the language technology field.He is a past President of the
Association for Computational Linguistics (1979), a co-recipient of the 1992 ACM Software Systems Award, and a Fellow of the ACM. During 1995–1996 he was a Fellow-in-Residence at theNetherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2006, he was honored with afestschrift titled "Intelligent linguistic architectures: variations on themes by Ronald M. Kaplan", published by CSLI Publications.External links
* ACM Award for Interlisp [http://awards.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=5323772&srt=all&aw=149&ao=SOFTWSYS]
* [http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/site/1575865327.html "Intelligent Linguistic Architectures"] CSLI book about Kaplan's work.
* PARC webpage [http://www2.parc.com/istl/members/kaplan/]
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