Volume 2, Issue 9 November 2002

2002
2001

Daniel Jurafsky (Liguistics '83, EECS '92), winner of a 2002 MacArthur Fellowship by David Pescovitz Computational linguist Daniel Jurafsky was recognized by the MacArthur Foundation for his "extraordinary originality and dedication." Berkeley engineering PhD Daniel Jurafsky is a genius when it comes to teaching computers how to better understand people. The winner of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, commonly called a "genius grant," Jurafsky is an associate professor of linguistics and computer science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Jurafsky, 39, was one of 24 recipients of this year's $500,000 grants to "pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations." The Berkeley Alum was chosen for his research in the field of computational linguistics. Developing a better understanding of how people use language is essential to the development of more-advanced natural language processing so we may someday talk to computers in our native tongue. To that end, Jurafsky is working on new speech recognition technology that is more forgiving of accents. He's also developing Web-based natural language software so users can query Internet resources in plain English. The MacArthur Selection Committee — a group of about a dozen leaders in the arts, sciences, humanities, and nonprofit area — praised Jurafsky's research for providing "clues to the underlying semantic structure of communication." "By identifying the syntactic patterns of a large number of actual sentences (using statistical methods), Jurafsky and his colleagues have found that computer parsers can be made more efficient by focusing on the most likely interpretations," the Committee wrote. Jurafsky's research may help humans talk to one another more effectively as well. For example, Jurafsky and his collaborators have shown that we pronounce words more precisely if they're key for the listener to be able to accurately understand potential ambiguities. Have a story you want to share about Daniel Jurafsky's extraordinary work? We want to hear from you... After a post-doctoral position at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley and an affiliation with the University's Department of Linguistics, Jurafsky joined the University of Colorado faculty in 1996. In 2000, he literally wrote the book on computational linguistics, "Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition," co-authored with CU-Boulder computer science professor James Martin. "Dan is an extraordinary person," said CU-Boulder Linguistics Chair Barbara Fox. "Not only is he a brilliant and creative thinker, but he is a kind, generous and giving human being. We are immensely proud of him, and we are extremely fortunate to have him in our community." Daniel Jurafsky's home page MacArthur Fellows Program Lab Notes is published online by the Public Affairs Office of the UC Berkeley College of Engineering. The Lab Notes mission is to illuminate groundbreaking research underway today at the College of Engineering that will dramatically change our lives tomorrow. Editor, Director of Public Affairs: Teresa Moore Writer, Researcher: David Pescovitz Designer: Robyn Altman Subscribe or send comments to the Engineering Public Affairs Office: lab-notes@coe.berkeley.edu. © 2002 UC Regents. Updated 11/1/02.