Martin Kay

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Martin Kay is a computer scientist known especially for his work in computational linguistics. Born and raised 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, one of the earliest centers for research in what is now known as Computational Linguistics. In 1961 he moved to the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California, where he eventually became head of research in linguistics and machine translation. 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 Linguistics.