ACM Honors Professor For Helping Computers Understand Natural Languages

ACM HONORS PROFESSOR FOR HELPING COMPUTERS UNDERSTAND NATURAL LANGUAGES

Best Young Computer Professional Makes Progress in Artificial Intelligence

 
New York, NY - March 29, 2007 - The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has recognized Dr. Daniel Klein, an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, for his design of the first machine learning system capable of inferring a high-quality grammar for English and other languages directly from text without human annotations or supervision. Dr. Klein's system is an important step towards producing computers that automate tasks involving human languages, a fundamental goal of artificial intelligence. Dr. Klein will receive the Grace Murray Hopper Award for outstanding young computer professional of the year. The award carries a $15,000 prize, and funding is provided by Google, Inc.

Dr. Klein's broader research on learning linguistic structure has produced the most accurate grammatical analysis system in the world for a variety of languages. This system is currently being used by several other research groups to improve language processing applications, including the state-of-the-art machine translation system at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute. Dr. Klein's group is now developing novel grammar-based models of machine translation based on his past work.

An assistant professor of Computer Science at Berkeley, Dr. Klein is also a manager of Talking Dolphin, a provider of software and services that enable sophisticated processing of text documents. His current research focuses on the automatic organization of natural language information, including models of information extraction, machine translation, and speech recognition.

Dr. Klein graduated from Cornell University in 1998, with a BA in Mathematics, Computer Science and Linguistics. He attended St. John's College of Cambridge University in the UK, where he earned an MST in Linguistics. He was awarded both MS and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University. He is the recipient of numerous honors, including a Marshall Scholarship. Among his most recent awards are a Sloan Fellowship, a Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship, and a National Science Foundation Career Award. His current research focuses on the automatic organization of natural language information, including models of machine translation, information extraction, and speech recognition.

ACM will present the Hopper Award to Dr. Klein at the annual ACM Awards Banquet on June 9, 2007, at the Del Coronado Hotel in San Diego, CA.

The Grace Murray Hopper Award honors the outstanding young computer professional of the year, selected on the basis of a single recent major technical or service contribution. The candidate must have been 35 years of age or less at the time the qualifying contribution was made. Financial support of the Grace Murray Hopper Award is provided by Google, Inc.

About ACM
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery http://www.acm.org, is an educational and scientific society uniting the world's computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field's challenges. ACM strengthens the profession's collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.