Prof. Martin Kay is a computer scientist known for his work in computational linguistics at Standford U. and Honorary Professor at Saarland U. He was born and grew up in Great Britain. He received his M.A. from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1961. In 1958 he started to work at the Cambridge Language Research Unit. Kay is one of the pioneers of computational linguistics and machine translation. He was responsible for introducing the notion of chart parsing in computational linguistics, and the notion of unification in linguistics generally.

 

With Ron Kaplan, he pioneered research and application development in finite-state morphology. He has been a longtime contributor to, and critic of, work on machine translation. In 1961 he moved to the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California, where he became head of research in linguistics and machine translation.

In his seminal paper “The Proper Place of Men and Machines in Language Translation”, Kay argued for MT systems that were integrated in the human translation process. He was reviewer and critic of EUROTRA, Verbmobil, and many other MT projects. Kay is former Chair of the Association of Computational Linguistics and ungoing Chair of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics.

He left Rand in 1972 to become Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. In 1974 he moved to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center as a Research Fellow. In 1985, while retaining his position at Xerox PARC, he joined the faculty of Stanford University half-time. He is currently Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University and Honorary Professor of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University.

His achievements include the development of chart parsing and functional unification grammar and major contributions to the application of finite state automata in computational phonology and morphology. He is also regarded as a leading authority on machine translation.

His honors include an honorary Doctor of Philosophy from Gothenburg University and the 2005 Association for Computational Linguistics’ Lifetime Achievement Award. He is the permanent chairman of the International Committee on Computational Linguistic.

 

Sources:

• Wikipedia 27 November 2007. Retrived: 28 April 2008 12:05 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Kay
• Stanford Departament of Linguistics. Retrieved: 28 April 2008 12:10 http://www.stanford.edu/~mjkay/bio_page.html