Madeleine Ashcraft Bates (born c. 1948) is a researcher in

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 ...

who worked at BBN Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. She was president of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1985, and co-editor of the book ''Challenges in Natural Language Processing'' (1993).

Education and career

Bates was a student at Allegheny College before transferring to

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

, where she majored in mathematics, graduating in 1968. She completed her Ph.D. in applied mathematics at Harvard University in 1975, working there with

Bill Woods William Woods (born 1962 in Moruya, New South Wales) is an Australian television journalist, radio and television broadcaster, and author. He is best known as the presenter, alongside Sandra Sully, of Network Ten's '' Ten News at Five'' in Sydn ...

augmented transition network An augmented transition network or ATN is a type of graph theoretic structure used in the operational definition of formal languages, used especially in parsing relatively complex natural languages, and having wide application in artificial intell ...

s. While a student at Harvard, she began working part-time at BBN in 1971. After completing her Ph.D., she was an assistant professor at Boston University for three years before becoming a full-time researcher at BBN.

Personal life

Bates married chemist Alan Hunt Bates in summer 1968; he later became a professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Her mother, Madeleine DeMuth Ashcraft (died 1990), was a long-term sufferer of Huntington's disease, and Bates has been an activist for the treatment of Huntington's disease, serving as president of the Massachusetts Chapter of the committee to Combat Huntington's Disease.

Selected publications

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bates, Madeleine Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American computer scientists American women computer scientists Computational linguistics researchers Carnegie Mellon University alumni Harvard University alumni Boston University faculty Presidents of the Association for Computational Linguistics