Ronald Kaplan
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Ronald M. Kaplan is Chief Technology and Science Officer at Powerset, Inc. He is also a Consulting Professor in the Linguistics Department at Stanford University and a Principal of Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI). He was formerly a Research Fellow at the Palo Alto Research Center (formerly the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center), where he was the manager of research in Natural Language Theory and Technology.
He received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Harvard University in 1975. As a graduate student he investigated how explicit computational models of grammar, particularly Augmented Transition Networks, could be embedded in models of human language performance, and he wrote the grammar for the LUNAR system, the first large-scale ATN grammar of English. He also developed the notions of consumer-producer and active-chart parsing. He designed (in collaboration with Joan Bresnan) the formal theory of Lexical Functional Grammar and produced its initial computational implementation. He developed (with Martin Kay) the mathematical, linguistic, and computational concepts that underlie the use of finite-state phonological and morphological descriptions.
He helped to embed finite-state methods in a wide range of commercial products offered by Xerox and by several Xerox spin-off companies: Microlytics, Inxight, and Scansoft. In the 1980's he served as Chief Scientist of Microlytics. He holds over 30 patents for inventions in the language technology field.
He is a past President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (1979), a co-recipient of the 1992 ACM Software Systems Award, and a Fellow of the ACM. During 1995–1996 he was a Fellow-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2006, he was honored with a festschrift titled Intelligent linguistic architectures: variations on themes by Ronald M. Kaplan, published by CSLI Publications.
