Christiane D. Fellbaum is an American linguist and computational linguistics researcher who is Lecturer with Rank of Professor in the Program in Linguistics and the Computer Science Department at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

. The co-developer of the

WordNet WordNet is a lexical database of semantic relations between words that links words into semantic relations including synonyms, hyponyms, and meronyms. The synonyms are grouped into ''synsets'' with short definitions and usage examples. It can thu ...

project, she is also its current director.

Biography

Fellbaum received a Ph.D. from

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

in 1980 and later joined Princeton's

Cognitive Science Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition (in a broad sense). Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include percep ...

Laboratory, working with

George Armitage Miller George Armitage Miller (February 3, 1920 – July 22, 2012) was an American psychologist who was one of the founders of cognitive psychology, and more broadly, of cognitive science. He also contributed to the birth of psycholinguistics. Miller ...

. Together with Miller and his team, she was a creator of

, a large lexical database that serves as a widely used resource in

computational linguistics Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, computational linguistics ...

and

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 ...

. Many researchers have since built upon her work, including AI researcher

Fei-Fei Li Fei-Fei Li (; born in Beijing, China, July 3, 1976) is a Chinese-American computer scientist known for her pioneering work in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in computer vision. She is best known for establishing ImageNet, the dat ...

, the inventor of

ImageNet The ImageNet project is a large visual database designed for use in Outline of object recognition, visual object recognition software research. More than 14 million images have been hand-annotated by the project to indicate what objects are pictur ...

, which was inspired by a 2006 conversation with Fellbaum as well as by the name and design of the original WordNet. She is a founder and president of the Global WordNet Association, which guides the construction of lexical databases in many languages. She is a site coordinator of the

North American Computational Linguistics Open competition The North American Computational Linguistics Open competition (NACLO), formerly called the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad before January 1, 2020, is a computational linguistics competition for high school students in the United ...

. Her research focuses on lexical semantics, the syntax-semantics interface, and computational linguistics.

Awards and honors

In 2001, Fellbaum was one of fourteen scientists to receive the Wolfgang-Paul Prize of the

Humboldt Foundation The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation () is a foundation that promotes international academic cooperation between scientists and scholars from Germany and abroad. Established by the government of the Federal Republic of Germany, it is funded by t ...

. She used her award money (1.53 million Euros) to construct an electronic database of German

idioms An idiom is a phrase or expression that largely or exclusively carries a figurative or non-literal meaning, rather than making any literal sense. Categorized as formulaic language, an idiomatic expression's meaning is different from the lit ...

('Kollokationen im Wörterbuch'), a three-year project that she led at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. The goal of the project, which focused on

collocation In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words t ...

s that combine nouns with verbs, was to analyze and record a wide range of German-language idioms. In 2006, she and WordNet collaborator George A. Miller were awarded the Antonio Zampolli Prize of the European Language Resources Association. According to the ELRA website, the prize recognizes "individuals whose work lies within the areas of Language Resources and Language Technology Evaluation with acknowledged contributions to their advancements."

References

External links

Biography of Christiane Fellbaum (German)Global WordNet AssociationWebpage at PrincetonHomepage and database access, Kollokationen project
(German) {{DEFAULTSORT:Fellbaum, Christiane Linguists from the United States Living people Women lexicographers Princeton University alumni Princeton University faculty American women linguists Natural language processing researchers Computational linguistics researchers 1950 births