Christiane D. Fellbaum is a Lecturer with Rank of Professor in the Program in Linguistics and the Computer Science Department at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

. The co-developer of the

WordNet WordNet is a lexical database of semantic relations between words in more than 200 languages. WordNet links words into semantic relations including synonyms, hyponyms, and meronyms. The synonyms are grouped into '' synsets'' with short definition ...

project, she is also its current director.

Biography

Fellbaum received a Ph.D. from

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

in 1980 and later joined Princeton's Cognitive Science Laboratory, working with

George Armitage Miller George Armitage Miller (February 3, 1920 – July 22, 2012) was an American psychologist who was one of the founders of cognitive psychology, and more broadly, of cognitive science. He also contributed to the birth of psycholinguistics. Mille ...

. Together with Miller and his team, she was a creator of

, a large lexical database that serves as a widely used resource in

computational linguistics Computational linguistics is an Interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, comput ...

and

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...

. Many researchers have since built upon her work, including AI researcher

Fei-Fei Li Fei-Fei Li (; born 1976) is a Chinese-American computer scientist who is known for establishing ImageNet, the dataset that enabled rapid advances in computer vision in the 2010s. She is the Sequoia Capital Professor of Computer Science at S ...

, the inventor of ImageNet, which was inspired by a 2006 conversation with Fellbaum as well as by the name and design of the original WordNet. She is a founder and president of the Global WordNet Association, which guides the construction of lexical databases in many languages. She is a site coordinator of the

North American Computational Linguistics Open competition The North American Computational Linguistics Open competition (NACLO), formerly called the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad before January 1, 2020, is a computational linguistics competition for high school students in the United ...

. Her research focuses on lexical semantics, the syntax-semantics interface, and computational linguistics.

Awards and honors

In 2001, Fellbaum was one of fourteen scientists to receive the Wolfgang-Paul Prize of the

Humboldt Foundation The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (german: Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung) is a foundation established by the government of the Federal Republic of Germany and funded by the Federal Foreign Office, the Federal Ministry of Education and Resea ...

. She used her award money (1.53 million Euros) to construct an electronic database of German

idioms An idiom is a phrase or expression that typically presents a figurative, non-literal meaning attached to the phrase; but some phrases become figurative idioms while retaining the literal meaning of the phrase. Categorized as formulaic language, ...

('Kollokationen im Wörterbuch'), a three-year project that she led at the

Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (german: Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften), abbreviated BBAW, is the official academic society for the natural sciences and humanities for the German states of Berlin a ...

. The goal of the project, which focused on

collocation In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words th ...

s that combine nouns with verbs, was to analyze and record a wide range of German-language idioms. In 2006, she and WordNet collaborator George A. Miller were awarded the Antonio Zampolli Prize of the European Language Resources Association. According to the ELRA website, the prize recognizes "individuals whose work lies within the areas of Language Resources and Language Technology Evaluation with acknowledged contributions to their advancements."

References

External links

Biography of Christiane Fellbaum (German)Global WordNet AssociationWebpage at PrincetonHomepage and database access, Kollokationen project
(German) Linguists from the United States Living people Women lexicographers Princeton University alumni German emigrants to the United States Princeton University faculty Women linguists Natural language processing researchers Computational linguistics researchers 1950 births {{US-linguist-stub