Jane J. Robinson

Abstract

Jane Robinson, a pioneering computational linguist, made major contributions to machine translation, natural language, and speech systems research programs at the RAND Corporation, IBM, and in the AI Center at SRI International. She served as ACL president in 1982. Jane became a computational linguist accidentally. She had a Ph.D. in history from UCLA, but could not obtain a faculty position in that field because those were reserved for men. Instead, she took positions teaching English, first at UCLA and then at California State College, Los Angeles. While at LA State, where she was tasked with teaching engineers how towrite, Jane noticed an announcement for a talk on Chomsky’s transformational grammar. She went to the talk thinking this work on grammar might help her teach better. Although its subject matter did not match her expectations, the talk marked a turning point in her career. In the late 1950s, Jane became a consultant to the RANDCorporation groupworking on machine translation under Dave Hays (ACL president, 1964). From the beginning, Jane was concerned with identifying connections between different traditions in formal grammars and their corresponding detailed linguistic realizations. Her 1965 International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING) paper, “Endocentric constructions and the Cocke parsing logic” (Robinson 1965), is a beautiful example of connecting specific linguistic phenomena to parsing strategies in a way that preserves the nature of the linguistic phenomena, endocentric constructions. While at RAND, Jane became colleague and friend to many in the machine translation and emerging computational linguistics world, including Susumo Kuno (ACL president 1967), Martin Kay (ACL president, 1969), Joyce Friedman (ACL president, 1971), and Karen Sparck Jones (ACL president, 1994). In the late 1960s, Jane moved to the Automata Theory and Computability Group at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. She used her knowledge of formal work on grammars and parsing to draw correspondences between Dependency Grammars and Phrase Structure Grammars. Although Jane came