Yorick Wilks

Infobox Scientist


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name = Yorick Wilks
birth_date = 1939
birth_place = flagicon|UK United Kingdom
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field = Natural language processing
work_institution = University of Sheffield, University of Oxford
alma_mater = University of Cambridge
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known_for = Artificial intelligence
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Yorick Wilks (born 1939) is a British Computer Scientist who is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Sheffield, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute.__FORCETOC__ __TOC__

Biography

Wilks was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge and was an early pioneer in meaning-based approaches to the understanding of natural language content by computers [Grishman, R. and Sterling, J. (1989) at [http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/H/H89/H89-2011.pdf] ] . 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 [Resnik, P. (1997) Selectional Preference and Sense Disambiguation, In Proceedings of ACL Siglex Workshop on Tagging Text with Lexical Semantics, Why, What and How?, Washington, April 4-5, 1997.] .

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 [Bob Kuhns (SUN MIcrosystems) review of MT systems at [http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/14/14-2879.html] ] . 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 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, and a member of the UK Computing Research Committee. He is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Sheffield and a Senior Research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. In the 1990s Professor Wilks became interested in modelling human-computer dialogue and the team lead by David Levy and him as chief researcher won the Loebner Prize in 1997 [David Levy (2007) blog entry http://www.powells.com/blog/?p=2643] . He is currently the 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 [Khurshid Ahmad, Christopher Brewster, Mark Stevenson (Editors) (2007) Words and Intelligence I: Selected Papers by Yorick Wilks. Springer, ISBN: 978-1402052842] was presented along with a volume of essays in his honor [Ahmad, K., Brewster, C., and Stevenson, M. (2007) (Editors). Words and Intelligence: Volume 2: Essays in Honour of Yorick Wilks (Springer, 2007). ] . 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.

Selected works

*Ballim, A., Wilks, Y. (1991) Artificial Believers: The Ascription of Belief. Lawrence Erlbaum Press.
*Wilks, Y., Fass, D. (1992) Preference Semantics: a family history. In Computing and Mathematics with Applications, Vol. 23, No. 2. A shorter version in the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence, (ed.) S. Shapiro. pp.1183-1194.
*Wilks, Y. (1973) Preference Semantics. In E. Keenan, (ed.) The Formal Semantics of Natural Language. Cambridge: Cambridge U. P.
*Wilks, Y. (1967) Semantic Consistency in Text. Systems Development Corporation, Santa Monica, CA. Technical Memorandum SP-2238.
*Wilks, Y. (1973) The Stanford Machine Translation and Understanding Project. In R. Rustin (ed.) Natural Language Processing, Algorithmics Press, New York. [and see [3] below]

Notes

External links

* [http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~yorick/ Yorick Wilks' profile at the University of Sheffield DCS]
* [http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/yorick/ Yorick Wilks' subsite at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford]