Martin Kay

Martin Kay (1935 – 8 August 2021) was a computer scientist, known especially for his work in computational linguistics. Born and raised in the United Kingdom, 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 centres for research in what is now known as Computational Linguistics. In 1961, he moved to the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California, US, 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 was most recently Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University and Honorary Professor of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University.

He was born in Edgware (Middlesex, Great Britain) in 1935 and he studied linguistics and computational linguistics at Trinity College in Cambridge. His main interests were translation, both by people and machines, and computational linguistic algorithms, especially in the fields of morphology and syntax.

Kay began his career at the Cambridge language Research Unit in Cambridge, England under Margaret Masterman. In 1961 David G. Hays hired him to work for the RAND Corporation; he subsequently worked for the University of California, Irvine and Xerox PARC. Kay is one of the pioneers of computational linguistics and machine translation. He was responsible for introducing the notion of chart parsing in computational
linguistics, and the notion of unification in linguistics generally. With Ron Kaplan, he pioneered research and application development in finite state morphology. He has been a longtime contributor to, and critic of, work on machine translation. In his seminal paper "The Proper Place of Men and Machines in Language Translation," Kay argued for MT systems that were tightly integrated in the human translation process. He was reviewer and critic of EUROTRA, Verbmobil, and many other MT projects. Kay was a former Chair of the Association of Computational Linguistics and President of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics. He was a Research Fellow at Xerox PARC until 2002. He held an
honorary doctorate of Gothenburg University. Kay received the lifetime Achievement Award of the Association for Computational Linguistics for his sustained role as an intellectual leader of NLP research in 2005.

His achievements included 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 was also regarded as a leading authority on machine translation. His honours included an honorary Doctor of Philosophy from Gothenburg University and the 2005 Association for Computational Linguistics' Lifetime Achievement Award. He was the permanent chairman of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics.

"Rules of Interpretation—An Approach to the Problem of Computation in the Semantics of Natural Language", in Proceedings of the Second International Congress of the International Federation for Information Processing, 1962. "A Parsing Procedure" Proceedings of the Second International Congress of the International Federation for Information Processing, 1962. "A General Procedure for Rewriting Strings", paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics, Bloomington, Indiana, 1964. The Logic of Cognate Recognition in Historical Linguistics, RM 4224 PR, Santa Monica, The RAND Corporation, July 1964. A Parsing Program for Categorial Grammars, RM 4283 PR, Santa Monica, The RAND Corporation, August 1964. The Tabular Parser: A Parsing Program for Phrase Structure and Dependency, RM 4933 PR, Santa Monica, The RAND Corporation, July 1966. The Computer System to Aid the Linguistic Field Worker, P 4095, Santa Monica, The RAND Corporation, May 1969. The MIND System: The Morphological Analysis Program, RM 6265/2 PR, Santa Monica, The RAND Corporation, April 1970. (with Gary R. Martins). "Automatic Translation of Natural Languages" in Language as a Human Problem: Daedalus, 1973. "Functional Unification Grammar: A Formalism for Machine Translation" in Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 84), The Association for Computational Linguistics, 1984. "Parsing in Free Word Order Languages" (with Lauri Karttunen), in Dowty, David R., Lauri Karttunen, and Arnold M. Zwicky, Natural Language Parsing, Cambridge University Press, 1985. "Unification in Grammar", in Dahl, V., and P. Saint Dizier, Natural Language Understanding and Logic Programming, North Holland, 1985. "Theoretical Issues in the Design of a Translator's Work Station", Proceedings of the IBM workshop on Computers and Translation, Copenhagen. "Regular Models of Phonological Rule Systems" (with R. M. Kaplan), Computational Linguistics 20:3 (September 1994. With R. M. Kaplan). "Substring Alignment Using Suffix Trees". Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing, Springer, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2004.

Disjunctive Unification http://www. stanford. edu/~mjkay/DisjunctiveUnification. pdf
Functional Uncertainty http://www. stanford. edu/~mjkay/FunctionalUncertainty. pdf
HPSG1 http://www. stanford. edu/~mjkay/pollard foundations. pdf
HPSG2 http://www. stanford. edu/~mjkay/levine03. pdf
HPSG Generation http://www. stanford. edu/~mjkay/Shieber. pdf
CCG http://www. stanford. edu/~mjkay/Steedman%26Baldridge. pdf
Typed Features http://www. stanford. edu/~mjkay/Copestake. pdf
Dependency http://www. stanford. edu/~mjkay/covington. pdf

He has an honorary professorship at the University of the Saarland and honorary doctorates from the universities of Gothenburg and Geneva. He also won the 2005 ACL Lifetime Achievement Award. His acceptance speech was entitled "A Life of Language".