User:Mil3096/Jane J. Robinson

Article Draft

Lead

Jane Robinson was a Computational Linguist who made major contributions to machine translation and speech system research. She contributed significantly to RAND Corporation, IBM, SRI International, and the AI Center's voice systems, natural language, and machine translation research programs. She also presided over the ACL in 1982 (Grosz, 2015).

Life

In 1918, Jane J. Robinson (formally known as Jane Johnson) was born near Dallas-Fort Worth and lived there for 2 years, until her family moved to Los Angeles California during the early 1920s. During the mid-1930s, Robinson attended The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where she graduated with an B.A in history in 1938. During the same year, Robinson went on to marry fellow classmate Edward Charles Robinson where they later went on to have four children. [1] She passed away on April 22, 2015.

Jane held an M.A., an M.A.J., and a PHD in history from UCLA. However, because those were typically male-dominated fields of study, she was unable to secure teaching jobs in those fields. She chose to become an English teacher at UCLA for 13 years before relocating to California State College, Los Angeles. It can be said that her career took a drastic turn when she was assigned to teach engineering students how to write. She continued to lecture at Cal State LA while being a computational linguist at RAND to support her family, due to her husband’s passing.

Involvement

Jane worked with the RAND during the 1950's on a project involving machine translation.

Jane worked for 14 years at SRI International in Menlo Park, CA. She was part of the PATR group in the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International. Her work involved natural language processing and grammar formalisms. She retired in 1987.

Jane was also president of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 1982

Research

In 1962, Jane wrote a memorandum for RAND called Preliminary Codes and Rules For the Automatic Parsing of English This work involved automatic machine analysis which will give the computers the ability to analyze natural English and convert it into formal structures for further manipulation.

In 1965, Jane and other researchers wrote a series of papers for the International Conference on Computational Linguistics called COLING 1965. She wrote the paper titled, Endocentric Constructions and the Cocke Parsing Logic. The paper goes into depth about how computers understanding sentence structure through syntactic analysis, can be made simpler by separating grammar rules from computer routines.

In 1981 Jane and other contributing researchers wrote Research on Natural-Language Processing at SRI, which was published on SRI International. Jane and Kurt Konolige wrote the paper Computational Aspects of the Use of Metarules in Formal Grammars. They describe the use of metarules and their use to create formal grammar in English. Their main goal is to find out if metarules can interact to create a reasonable amount of rules and correct grammar.

References

1. Zwicky, A. (2015, October 6). Jane J. Robinson. Arnold Zwicky’s Blog. https://arnoldzwicky.org/2015/10/06/jane-j-robinson/
2. https://direct.mit.edu/coli/article/41/4/723/1509/Jane-J-Robinson
3. https://www.sri.com/publication/cyber-formal-methods-pubs/notes-from-the-unification-underground-a-compilation-of-papers-on-unification-based-grammar-formalisms/
4. https://aclanthology.org/events/coling-1965/
5. https://www.kuenzigbooks.com/pages/books/27581/jane-j-robinson/preliminary-codes-and-rules-for-the-automatic-parsing-of-english-memorandum-rm-3339-pr-december