People -- Researchers and practitioners in NLP

Often, the best way to understand a field is to get to know the people working in it and what they do. Below is a set of links to people's home pages or particular portions of them that can help you get acquainted with the people in the field of NLP, including people working on NLP applied to biological text.

There is more here than a list of names. Each person listed typically has material of interest accessible through their home page. In addition I sometimes will point out particularly interesting papers or books they have authored and give separate links for them, some cached.

Who is omitted below? Many are. Most by oversight or lack of time. But many of the omitted names are people who work in highly theoretical aspects of NLP or in areas such as multimedia, NL generation, and many other specialized areas that are not central to this site. To all who should have been included and are not, I apologize. And I invite anyone to contact me to correct omissions or to correct or update the information below. Many of the entries below are initially placeholders and will be filled in as I find the time and suitable information to include. I do have additional people in mind who are not even included as placeholders

James Allen

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Chris Brew

Chris is currently at Ohio State and works primarily on statistical NLP. From his site: "I work on computational linguistics and language technology at The Ohio State University. My main research goal is the exploitation for natural language processing of statistical and probabilistic ideas: and, if possible, their importation into linguistic theory."

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To quote from her site at Cornell: "My primary research is in the area of natural language understanding and intelligent text processing where my goal is to develop algorithms and systems that will vastly improve a user's ability to find, absorb, and extract information from on-line text. My group's research generally proceeds at two complementary levels: we focus both on building real systems for large-scale natural language processing tasks and on developing techniques to address underlying theoretical problems in syntactic and semantic analysis of natural language. In particular, we are investigating the use of machine learning techniques as tools for guiding natural language system development and for exploring the mechanisms that underlie language understanding. Our work encompasses a number of related areas:

the machine learning of natural language,

the use of corpus-based NLP techniques to aid information retrieval systems, and

the design of user-trainable systems that can efficiently and reliably extract the important information from a document.

Currently, we are working on noun phrase coreference, partial parsing, multilingual information extraction, and building general-purpose question-answering systems."

John Carroll

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Eugene Charniak

Charniak is a major figure in the NLP community. He writes clearly. From his homepage:

"Eugene Charniak is Professor of Computer Science. and Cognitive Science at Brown University. He received an A.B. degree in Physics from University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from M.I.T. in Computer Science. He has published four books: Computational Semantics, with Yorick Wilks (1976); Artificial Intelligence Programming (now in a second edition) with Chris Riesbeck, Drew McDermott, and James Meehan (1980, 1987); Introduction to Artificial Intelligence with Drew McDermott (1985); and Statistical Language Learning (1993). He is a Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence and was previously a Councilor of the organization. His research has always been in the area of language understanding or technologies which relate to it, such as knowledge representation, reasoning under uncertainty, and learning. Over the last few years he has been interested in statistical techniques for language understanding. His research in this area has included work in the subareas of part-of-speech tagging, probabilistic context-free grammar induction, and, more recently, syntactic disambiguation through word statistics, efficient syntactic parsing, and lexical resource acquisition through statistical means."

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky was responsible for much of the modern revolution in linguistics, starting with his slight volume, Syntactic Structures (1957). By defining the notion of grammars rigorously, he opened up the subject to the later computational approaches. This is not to say that computer scientists were lax in these areas. Chomsky's own website is modest. A far more extensive site is the Noam Chomsky Archive site.

Ken Church

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Doug Cutting

Doug is probably best known in NLP for his work on part-of-speech tagging, specifically, his 1992 ANLP paper (cached). (Applied NLP Conf.)

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Though she works primarily in information retrieval topics related to the web, at UCB, she has done and continues to do important work on text data mining, a topic central to this website. Her brief bio: "I joined the SIMS faculty in Fall 1997. From 1994-1997 I was a Member of the Research Staff at Xerox PARC working on information access. I received my BA, MS, and PhD degrees in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley in the BAIR group. I was an intern at Xerox PARC for much of graduate school."

Graeme Hirst

[in preparation]

Jerry Hobbs

USC/ISI
4676 Admiralty Way
Marina del Rey, CA 90292
USA

Phone:    310-448-9140
Fax:      310-577-0751
Email:    hobbs@isi.edu
Web page: http://www.isi.edu/~hobbs/
(as of 9/26/2002)

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Barbara has done a good deal of groundbreaking work on the foundations of the semantics of language. On the practical side, she is a co-author of a very readable and useful book on the mathematical foundations of linguistic theory, B. Partee, A. ter Meulen, R. Wall: Mathematical Methods in Linguistics (Kluwer 1990). This is a textbook, not an advanced treatise, so it is quite approachable.

James Pustejovsky

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