Naomi Sager (born 1927) is an American computational linguistics research scientist. She is a former research professor at

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then- Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. In 1832, th ...

, now retired. She is a pioneer in the development of natural language processing for computers.

Early life and education

Sager was born in

Chicago, Illinois (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

in 1927. In 1946 she earned a bachelor of philosophy degree from the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...

. She obtained a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University o ...

in electrical engineering from

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

in 1953.

Career

After graduating from Columbia, Sager worked for five years as an electronics engineer in the Biophysics Department of the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

. In 1959 she moved to the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

, where she worked on natural language computer processing. She was part of the team that developed the first English language parsing program, running on the

UNIVAC I The UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer I) was the first general-purpose electronic digital computer design for business application produced in the United States. It was designed principally by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the inven ...

. Sager developed an algorithm to deal with

syntactic ambiguity Syntactic ambiguity, also called structural ambiguity, amphiboly or amphibology, is a situation where a sentence may be interpreted in more than one way due to ambiguous sentence structure. Syntactic ambiguity arises not from the range of mean ...

(where a sentence can be interpreted several ways due to ambiguity in its structure) and to convert sublanguage texts into suitable data formats for retrieval. This was "one of the first major practical applications of sublanguage analysis." This work formed the basis for a PhD thesis, and in 1968 she was awarded a PhD in

linguistics Linguistics is the science, scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure ...

from the University of Pennsylvania. Her work in linguistics led her to New York University, where she collaborated with James Morris and Morris Salkoff to develop a parsing program based on natural language processing. In 1965 NYU launched the Linguistic String Project under Sager's leadership. It was aimed at developing computer methods to access information in the scientific and technical literature, based on linguistic principles. In particular, the team drew on

Zellig Harris Zellig Sabbettai Harris (; October 23, 1909 – May 22, 1992) was an influential American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and dis ...

discourse analysis Discourse analysis (DA), or discourse studies, is an approach to the analysis of written, vocal, or sign language use, or any significant semiotic event. The objects of discourse Analysis (discourse, writing, conversation, communicative event) ...

methodology to develop a system for computer analysis of natural language.Sager, Naomi, and Nhan, Ngo Than, "The computability of strings, transformations, and sublanguage", pp. 78–120. Chapter in ''The Legacy of Zellig Harris'', Vol. 2, ed. by Bruce Nevin and Stephen M. Johnson, John Benjamins Publishing Co. (2002) Sager managed the project for 30 years until her retirement in 1995. At NYU she taught classes in natural language processing and advised doctoral students, many of whom (such as

Jerry Hobbs Jerry R. Hobbs (born January 25, 1942) is an American researcher in the fields of computational linguistics, discourse analysis, and artificial intelligence. Education Hobbs earned his doctor's degree from New York University in 1974 in compute ...

and Carol Friedman) are now leaders in the field of natural language processing.

Selected publications

* Sager, Naomi
''Natural Language Information Processing: A Computer Grammar of English and Its Applications''
Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. (1981). * Sager, Naomi
''Syntactic analysis of natural language.''
Advances in computers 8.153–188 (1967): 35. * Sager, Naomi, ''et al.''
Natural Language Processing and the Representation of Clinical Data
'' Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 1:142–160 (March–April 1994).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sager, Naomi American computer scientists New York University faculty University of Chicago alumni University of Pennsylvania alumni Columbia School of Engineering and Applied Science alumni Natural language processing 1927 births Living people People from Chicago Natural language processing researchers Computational linguistics researchers