Ronald M. Kaplan (born 1946) has served as a vice president at Amazon.com and chief scientist for Amazon Search ( A9.com). He was previously vice president and distinguished scientist at Nuance Communications and director of Nuance' Natural Language and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Prior to that he served as chief scientist and a principal researcher at the

Powerset In mathematics, the power set (or powerset) of a set is the set of all subsets of , including the empty set and itself. In axiomatic set theory (as developed, for example, in the ZFC axioms), the existence of the power set of any set is po ...

division of

Microsoft Bing Microsoft Bing (also known simply as Bing) is a search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. The service traces its roots back to Microsoft's earlier search engines, including MSN Search, Windows Live Search, and Live Search. Bing offers a ...

. He is also an adjunct professor in the Linguistics Department at

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

and a principal of Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI). He was previously a research fellow at the Palo 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 bachelor's degree (1968) in mathematics and language behavior from the University of California, Berkeley and his master's (1970) and Ph.D. (1975) in

social psychology Social psychology is the methodical study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. Although studying many of the same substantive topics as its counterpart in the field ...

from

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

. As a graduate student he investigated how explicit computational models of

grammar In linguistics, grammar is the set of rules for how a natural language is structured, as demonstrated by its speakers or writers. Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses, phrases, and words. The term may also refer to the study of such rul ...

, 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 with

Joan Bresnan Joan Wanda Bresnan FBA (born August 22, 1945) is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities Emerita at Stanford University. She is best known as one of the architects (with Ronald Kaplan) of the theoretical framework of lexical functional gram ...

) the formal theory of

Lexical Functional Grammar Lexical functional grammar (LFG) is a constraint-based grammar framework in theoretical linguistics. It posits several parallel levels of syntactic structure, including a phrase structure grammar representation of word order and constituency, an ...

and produced its initial computational implementation. He developed (with Martin Kay) the mathematical, linguistic, and computational concepts that underlie the use of finite-state

phonological Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often prefer ...

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, and Scansoft. In the 1980s he served as chief scientist of Microlytics. He holds 36 patents for inventions in the language technology field. He was honored with the 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). He is a past President (1979) and an inaugural Fellow (2011) of the ACL, a co-recipient of the 1992 ACM Software Systems Award for his contribution to the Interlisp programming system, and a 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 ...

. He is also a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society. During 1995–1996 he was a Fellow-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2006, he was honored with a

festschrift In academia, a ''Festschrift'' (; plural, ''Festschriften'' ) is a book honoring a respected person, especially an academic, and presented during their lifetime. It generally takes the form of an edited volume, containing contributions from the h ...

titled ''Intelligent linguistic architectures: variations on themes by Ronald M. Kaplan'', published by CSLI Publications. He was awarded honorary doctorates from Copenhagen University in 2013 and from the University of York in 2019.

References

External links

* ACM Award for Interlis

''Intelligent Linguistic Architectures''
CSLI book about Kaplan's work. {{DEFAULTSORT:Kaplan, Ronald M. Living people 1946 births American computer scientists Harvard University alumni Stanford University Department of Linguistics faculty Computational linguistics researchers Scientists at PARC (company) Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society Fellows of the Association for Computational Linguistics Lisp (programming language) people Presidents of the Association for Computational Linguistics 1994 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery