Bonnie Jean Dorr is an American computer scientist specializing in

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...

machine translation Machine translation is use of computational techniques to translate text or speech from one language to another, including the contextual, idiomatic and pragmatic nuances of both languages. Early approaches were mostly rule-based or statisti ...

automatic summarization Automatic summarization is the process of shortening a set of data computationally, to create a subset (a summary) that represents the most important or relevant information within the original content. Artificial intelligence algorithms are comm ...

, social computing, and

explainable artificial intelligence Explainable AI (XAI), often overlapping with interpretable AI, or explainable machine learning (XML), is a field of research within artificial intelligence (AI) that explores methods that provide humans with the ability of ''intellectual oversig ...

. She is a professor and director of the Natural Language Processing Research Laboratory in the Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering at the

University of Florida The University of Florida (Florida or UF) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Gainesville, Florida, United States. It is a senior member of the State University System of Florida and a preem ...

Gainesville, Florida Gainesville is the county seat of Alachua County, Florida, United States, and the most populous city in North Central Florida, with a population of 145,212 in 2022. It is the principal city of the Gainesville metropolitan area, Florida, Gainesv ...

She is professor emerita of computer science and linguistics and former dean at the

University of Maryland, College Park The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1856, UMD i ...

, former associate director at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition,, and former president of the

Association for Computational Linguistics The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is a scientific and professional organization for people working on natural language processing. Its namesake conference is one of the primary high impact conferences for natural language proce ...

Education

Dorr is a graduate of

Boston University Boston University (BU) is a Private university, private research university in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. BU was founded in 1839 by a group of Boston Methodism, Methodists with its original campus in Newbury (town), Vermont, Newbur ...

, and earned both a Master's (1986) and a Ph.D. (1990) from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

. Her dissertation, ''Lexical Conceptual Structure and Machine Translation'', was supervised by Robert C. Berwick.

Academic career

Dorr joined the University of Maryland faculty in 1992. At Maryland, she became the founding co-director of the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing Laboratory, and associate dean of the university's College of Computer, Math, and Natural Sciences (formerly College of Computer, Math, and Physical Sciences). She has also worked as a program director at

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adva ...

beginning in 2011 while on leave from Maryland. She joined the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition in 2014. In January 2022, she joined the

as a professor, where she founded and now serves as director of the Natural Language Processing Research Laboratory.

Book

Dorr is the author of ''Machine Translation: A View from the Lexicon'' (MIT Press, 1993), a revision of her doctoral dissertation. It describes an approach to interlingual machine translation in which, rather than directly translating text from one language to another, it goes through an intermediate form represented using

conceptual semantics Conceptual semantics is a framework for semantic analysis developed mainly by Ray Jackendoff in 1976. Its aim is to provide a characterization of the conceptual elements by which a person understands words and sentences, and thus to provide ''an e ...

. The translations between the

syntax In linguistics, syntax ( ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituenc ...

of each natural language handled by the system and this form are made using

government and binding theory Government and binding (GB, GBT) is a theory of syntax and a phrase structure grammar in the tradition of transformational grammar developed principally by Noam Chomsky in the 1980s. This theory is a radical revision of his earlier theories and was ...

, in contrast to the more typical approach from that time which performed this sort of translation using

phrase structure grammar The term phrase structure grammar was originally introduced by Noam Chomsky as the term for grammar studied previously by Emil Post and Axel Thue ( Post canonical systems). Some authors, however, reserve the term for more restricted grammars in t ...

s and the unification of feature structures. Her system was embodied in the UNITRAN system, and translated between English, Spanish, and German. However, her work was criticized for its lack of completeness (inability to handle certain common grammatical structures in these languages). Subsequently to Dorr's work,

rule-based machine translation Rule-based machine translation (RBMT) is a classical approach of machine translation systems based on linguistic information about source and target languages. Such information is retrieved from (unilingual, bilingual or multilingual) dictionaries ...

systems such as hers have largely been supplanted by

statistical machine translation Statistical machine translation (SMT) is a machine translation approach where translations are generated on the basis of statistical models whose parameters are derived from the analysis of bilingual text corpora. The statistical approach contra ...

and

neural machine translation Neural machine translation (NMT) is an approach to machine translation that uses an artificial neural network to predict the likelihood of a sequence of words, typically modeling entire sentences in a single integrated model. It is the dominant a ...

, and some of Dorr's own later work instead focuses on data-driven approaches to machine translation and prioritization of explainability in the face of the recent push for large language models (e.g.,

ChatGPT ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and released on November 30, 2022. It uses large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4o as well as other Multimodal learning, multimodal models to create human-like re ...

Recognition

Dorr was president of the Association for Computational Linguistics for 2008. She has been a Sloan Research Fellow and

National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...

Presidential Faculty Fellow. She was elected as a Fellow of the

Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is an international Learned society, scientific society devoted to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence. AAAI also aims to increase public under ...

in 2013 for "significant contributions to natural language understanding and representation, and development of the widely recognized methods for interlingual machine translation". In 2016 she was elected as a Fellow of the

and in 2021 she was elected Fellow of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membe ...

References

External links

Official website
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Dorr, Bonnie Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American computer scientists American women computer scientists Boston University alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni University of Maryland, College Park faculty Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Fellows of the Association for Computational Linguistics Natural language processing researchers 21st-century American women Recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers Presidents of the Association for Computational Linguistics