Jerry R. Hobbs (born January 25, 1942) is an American researcher in the fields of

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 ...

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

, and

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

Education

Hobbs earned his doctor's degree from

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private university, private research university in New York City, New York, United States. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded in 1832 by Albert Gallatin as a Nondenominational ...

in 1974 in

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 has taught at

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...

and the

City University of New York The City University of New York (CUNY, pronounced , ) is the Public university, public university system of Education in New York City, New York City. It is the largest urban university system in the United States, comprising 25 campuses: eleven ...

Career

From 1977 to 2002 he was with the

Artificial Intelligence Center The Artificial Intelligence Center is a laboratory in the Information and Computing Sciences Division of SRI International. It was founded in 1966 by Charles Rosen and studies artificial intelligence. One of their early projects was Shakey the ...

SRI International SRI International (SRI) is a nonprofit organization, nonprofit scientific research, scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California, United States. It was established in 1946 by trustees of Stanford Univer ...

, Menlo Park,

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

, where he was a principal scientist and program director of the Natural Language Program. He has written numerous papers in the areas of

parsing Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is a process of analyzing a String (computer science), string of Symbol (formal), symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal gramm ...

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 ...

semantic Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...

interpretation, information extraction,

knowledge representation Knowledge representation (KR) aims to model information in a structured manner to formally represent it as knowledge in knowledge-based systems whereas knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR, KR&R, or KR²) also aims to understand, reason, and ...

, encoding

commonsense knowledge In artificial intelligence research, commonsense knowledge consists of facts about the everyday world, such as "Lemons are sour", or "Cows say moo", that all humans are expected to know. It is currently an unsolved problem in artificial gener ...

, the structure of conversation, and the

Semantic Web The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable. To enable the encoding o ...

. He is the author of the book ''Literature and Cognition'', and was also editor of the book ''Formal Theories of the Commonsense World''. He led SRI's text-understanding research, and directed the development of the abduction-based TACITUS system for text understanding, and the FASTUS system for rapid extraction of information from text based on finite-state automata. The latter system constituted the basis for an SRI spinoff, Discern Communications. In September 2002 he took a position as senior computer scientist and research professor at the

Information Sciences Institute The USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) is a component of the University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering, and specializes in research and development in information processing, computing, and communications techn ...

University of Southern California The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in ...

. He has been a consulting professor with the Linguistics Department and the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford University. He has served as general editor of the Ablex Series on Artificial Intelligence. He is a past 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 ...

, and is a Fellow of the

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

. In January 2003 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Uppsala, Sweden. In August 2013 he received the Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award.

Works

# ''Literature and Cognition'' (Lecture Notes, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Jul 9, 1990) # ''Local Pragmatics'' (Technical note, SRI International, 1987) # ''Commonsense Metaphysics and Lexical Semantics'' (Technical note, SRI International, 1986) # ''An Algorithm for Generating Quantifier Scopings'' (Report, Center for the Study of Language and Information, 1986) # ''Formal Theories of the Commonsense World'' (Ablex Series in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 1, Jun 1985, with Robert C. Moore) # ''On the Coherence and Structure of Discourse'' (Report, 1985) # ''The Coherence of Incoherent Discourse'' (Report, 1985) # ''Making Computational Sense of Montague's Intensional Logic'' (Courant computer science report, 1976) # ''A Metalanguage for Expressing Grammatical Restrictions in Nodal Spans Parsing of Natural Language'' (Courant computer science report, 1974)

References

External links

Jerry Hobbs ISI page
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Hobbs, Jerry 1942 births Living people 20th-century American philosophers Linguists from the United States American cognitive scientists Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence SRI International people New York University alumni Presidents of the Association for Computational Linguistics