Eugene Charniak (1946 – June 13, 2023) was a professor of

computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

and

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 ...

Brown University Brown University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. It is the List of colonial colleges, seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the US, founded in 1764 as the ' ...

. He held an A.B. in Physics from the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, or UChi) is a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its main campus is in the Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Chic ...

and a Ph.D. from M.I.T. in Computer Science. His research was in the area of language understanding or technologies which relate to it, such as knowledge representation, reasoning under uncertainty, and learning. Since the early 1990s he was interested in statistical techniques for language understanding. His research in this area included work in the subareas of

part-of-speech tagging In corpus linguistics, part-of-speech tagging (POS tagging, PoS tagging, or POST), also called grammatical tagging, is the process of marking up a word in a text ( corpus) as corresponding to a particular part of speech, based on both its defini ...

, probabilistic context-free grammar induction, and, more recently, syntactic disambiguation through word statistics, efficient syntactic parsing, and lexical resource acquisition through statistical means. He was a Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence and was previously a Councilor of the organization. He was also honored with the 2011

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 ...

Lifetime Achievement Award and awarded the 2011 Calvin & Rose G Hoffman Prize. In 2011, he was named a fellow of the

. In 2015, he won 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 ...

(AAAI) Classic Paper Award for a paper
“Statistical Parsing with a Context-Free Grammar and Word Statistics”
that he presented at the Fourteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence in 1997.

Books

He published six books: # ''Computational Semantics'', (with Yorick Wilks), Amsterdam: North-Holland (1976) # ''Artificial Intelligence Programming'' (now in a second edition) (with Chris Riesbeck, Drew McDermott, and James Meehan), Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (1980, 1987) # ''Introduction to Artificial Intelligence'' (with Drew McDermott), Reading MA: Addison-Wesley (1985) # ''Statistical Language Learning'', Cambridge: MIT Press (1993) # ''Introduction to Deep Learning'', Cambridge:

MIT Press The MIT Press is the university press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The MIT Press publishes a number of academic journals and has been a pioneer in the Open Ac ...

(2019) # ''AI & I: An Intellectual History of Artificial Intelligence'', Cambridge:

(2024)

References

External links

Eugene Charniak's homepage at Brown University
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"The Nature Of Life, The Nature Of Thinking: Looking Back On Eugene Charniak’s Work And Life"
American computer scientists Brown University faculty Living people Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence University of Chicago alumni MIT School of Engineering alumni Fellows of the Association for Computational Linguistics Natural language processing researchers Machine learning researchers 1946 births {{US-compu-bio-stub