Ralph Grishman is an

American American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, p ...

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 ...

and professor at New York University's

Courant Institute The Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences (commonly known as Courant or CIMS) is the mathematics research school of New York University (NYU). Founded in 1935, it is named after Richard Courant, one of the founders of the Courant Institute ...

. He is known for his work 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 ...

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 ...

(NLP), and for helping establish Information Extraction (IE) in NLP. Grishman's contributions were recognized by 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 ...

(ACL), the international body promoting research in

, with its

Lifetime Achievement Award Lifetime achievement awards are awarded by various organizations, to recognize contributions over the whole of a career, rather than or in addition to single contributions. Such awards, and organizations presenting them, include: A * A.C. ...

in 2024.

Career

Early in his career, Grishman worked with the

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adva ...

, where he served as a Member of the ARPA Speech & Natural Language Standing Committee (1992-1994) and as Chair of the

DARPA TIPSTER Program The DARPA TIPSTER Text program was started in 1991 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It is a 9-year multi-million dollar initiative, which sought to improve Human Language Technology (HLT) for the handling of multilingual c ...

Phase II Architecture Working Group from 1994 to 1998. In 1990, Grishman served as Vice President of the international

(ACL), and was elected President of the ACL in 1991. From 2010 to 2016, Grishman worked with the

National Institute of Standards and Technology The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into Outline of p ...

, and as the organizer of th
Text Analysis Conference
Grishman has acted as a program chair and a member of executive committees for numerous conferences of the ACL and its various chapters. In 2017, he was elected a Fellow of the

''.'' In 2024, he was awarded the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award.

Research

Ralph Grishman's work covers a range of problems in the field of

and

Information extraction

Grishman has done a lot of work in the field of Information Extraction and was one of the original designers and contributors to the MUC competitions (MUCs). His ‘‘Proteus’’ system achieved high performance among more than 20 international participants — including universities and companies — at the Sixth MUC Competition (MUC-6), specifically in the ‘‘Scenario Template’’ task, which represented the most complex challenge evaluated at MUC-6.

Other areas of NLP

Grishman worked on the Linguistic String Project, led by

Naomi Sager Naomi Sager (born 1927) is an American computational linguistics research scientist. She is a former research professor at New York University, now retired. She is a pioneer in the development of natural language processing for computers. Early ...

. He has published in areas including information extraction,

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

machine translation Machine translation is use of computational techniques to translate text or speech from one language to another, including the contextual, idiomatic and pragmatic nuances of both languages. Early approaches were mostly rule-based or statisti ...

syntactic parsing Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is a process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar by breaking it into parts. The term ''pa ...

, and syntactic treebanks for natural languages. His work appears in the proceedings 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, ...

conferences, including the meetings of the

and EMNLP. His published monographs include a textbook on

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 ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Grishman, Ralph Living people Computer scientists Natural language processing researchers Columbia University alumni Data miners 1948 births