Jerry R. Hobbs (born January 25, 1942) is an American researcher in the fields of

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 ...

, discourse analysis, and

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

Education

Hobbs earned his doctor's degree from

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then-Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. In 1832, the ...

in 1974 in

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

and has taught at

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

and the

City University of New York The City University of New York ( CUNY; , ) is the Public university, public university system of Education in New York City, New York City. It is the largest urban university system in the United States, comprising 25 campuses: eleven Upper divis ...

Career

From 1977 to 2002 he was with the

Artificial Intelligence Center The Artificial Intelligence Center is a laboratory in the Information and Computing Sciences Division of SRI International. It was founded in 1966 by Charles Rosen and studies artificial intelligence. One of their early projects was Shakey the Robo ...

at SRI International, Menlo Park,

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

, where he was a principal scientist and program director of the Natural Language Program. He has written numerous papers in the areas of

parsing Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is the process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar. The term ''parsing'' comes from Lati ...

syntax In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency) ...

semantic Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...

interpretation, information extraction,

knowledge representation Knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR, KR&R, KR²) is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to representing information about the world in a form that a computer system can use to solve complex tasks such as diagnosing a medic ...

, encoding

commonsense knowledge In artificial intelligence research, commonsense knowledge consists of facts about the everyday world, such as "Lemons are sour", that all humans are expected to know. It is currently an unsolved problem in Artificial General Intelligence. The f ...

, discourse analysis, the structure of conversation, and the Semantic Web. He is the author of the book ''Literature and Cognition'', and was also editor of the book ''Formal Theories of the Commonsense World''. He led SRI's text-understanding research, and directed the development of the abduction-based TACITUS system for text understanding, and the FASTUS system for rapid extraction of information from text based on finite-state automata. The latter system constituted the basis for an SRI spinoff, Discern Communications. In September 2002 he took a position as senior computer scientist and research professor at the

Information Sciences Institute The USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) is a component of the University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering, and specializes in research and development in information processing, computing, and communications techno ...

University of Southern California The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in C ...

. He has been a consulting professor with the Linguistics Department and the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford University. He has served as general editor of the Ablex Series on Artificial Intelligence. He is a past president of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and is a Fellow of the

American Association for Artificial Intelligence The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is an international scientific society devoted to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence. AAAI also aims to increase public understanding of artif ...

. In January 2003 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Uppsala, Sweden. In August 2013 he received the Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award.

Works

# ''Literature and Cognition'' (Lecture Notes, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Jul 9, 1990) # ''Local Pragmatics'' (Technical note, SRI International, 1987) # ''Commonsense Metaphysics and Lexical Semantics'' (Technical note, SRI International, 1986) # ''An Algorithm for Generating Quantifier Scopings'' (Report, Center for the Study of Language and Information, 1986) # ''Formal Theories of the Commonsense World'' (Ablex Series in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 1, Jun 1985, with Robert C. Moore) # ''On the Coherence and Structure of Discourse'' (Report, 1985) # ''The Coherence of Incoherent Discourse'' (Report, 1985) # ''Making Computational Sense of Montague's Intensional Logic'' (Courant computer science report, 1976) # ''A Metalanguage for Expressing Grammatical Restrictions in Nodal Spans Parsing of Natural Language'' (Courant computer science report, 1974)

References

External links

Jerry Hobbs ISI page
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Hobbs, Jerry 1942 births Living people 20th-century American philosophers Linguists from the United States American cognitive scientists Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence SRI International people New York University alumni Presidents of the Association for Computational Linguistics