Martha (Stone) Palmer is an American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

. She is best known for her work on verb semantics, and for the creation of ontological resources such as

PropBank PropBank is a corpus that is annotated with verbal propositions and their arguments—a "proposition bank". Although "PropBank" refers to a specific corpus produced by Martha Palmer ''et al.'', the term ''propbank'' is also coming to be used as ...

and

VerbNet The VerbNet project maps PropBank PropBank is a corpus that is annotated with verbal propositions and their arguments—a "proposition bank". Although "PropBank" refers to a specific corpus produced by Martha Palmer ''et al.'', the term ''prop ...

Education

Palmer received a

Master of Arts A Master of Arts ( or ''Artium Magister''; abbreviated MA or AM) is the holder of a master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The degree is usually contrasted with that of Master of Science. Those admitted to the degree have ...

in Computer Science from

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public university, public research university in Austin, Texas, United States. Founded in 1883, it is the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. With 53,082 stud ...

in 1976, advised by Robert Simmons. She received her

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

from the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh (, ; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a Public university, public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Founded by the City of Edinburgh Council, town council under th ...

in 1985. Her thesis was titled "Driving semantics for a limited domain", and was advised by

Alan Bundy Alan Richard Bundy (born 18 May 1947) is a professor at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh,http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/bundy/ Professor Alan Bundy's website known for his contributions to automated reasoning, especially ...

Career

Palmer is currently a professor of computer science and

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 ...

at the

University of Colorado Boulder The University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder, CU, or Colorado) is a public research university in Boulder, Colorado, United States. Founded in 1876, five months before Colorado became a state, it is the flagship university of the University o ...

. She was previously on the faculty of the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...

Awards and honors

Palmer served as 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 ...

in 2005 and was named an ACL Fellow in 2014 "for significant contributions to computational semantics and the development of semantic corpora". In 2017, she was awarded the Helen & Hubert Croft Professorship by the University of Colorado. In the same year, the university named her a "Professor of Distinction", a title reserved for professors who have received international recognition for their research. She was elected an

AAAI Fellow Fellowship of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (abbreviated as AAAI Fellow or FAAAI) is an award granted to individuals that the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), judged to have made ...

in 2020 "for significant contributions to natural language processing and knowledge representation, including widely-used corpora of annotated structures in several languages". In 2023, she was awarded the ACL Lifetime achievement award, the highest distinction by the Association for Computational Linguistics, for her lifetime work on verb semantics.

References

External links

Martha Palmer's home page
Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American computer scientists University of Colorado Boulder faculty University of Pennsylvania faculty Alumni of the University of Edinburgh American expatriates in Scotland University of Texas at Austin alumni American women computer scientists Computational linguistics researchers Natural language processing researchers American women academics 21st-century American women Presidents of the Association for Computational Linguistics {{US-compu-bio-stub Fellows of the Association for Computational Linguistics Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence