Wendy Grace Lehnert is an American computer scientist specializing in natural language processing and known for her pioneering use of

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

in natural language processing. She is a professor emerita at the

University of Massachusetts Amherst The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst, UMass) is a public research university in Amherst, Massachusetts and the sole public land-grant university in Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Founded in 1863 as an agricultural college, ...

Education and career

Lehnert earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from

Portland State University Portland State University (PSU) is a public research university in Portland, Oregon. It was founded in 1946 as a post-secondary educational institution for World War II veterans. It evolved into a four-year college over the following two decad ...

in 1972, and a master's degree from

Yeshiva University Yeshiva University is a private Orthodox Jewish university with four campuses in New York City."About YU
on the Yeshiva Universi ...

in 1974. She became a student of

Roger Schank Roger Carl Schank (born 1946) is an American artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist, learning scientist, educational reformer, and entrepreneur. Beginning in the late 1960s, he pioneered conceptual dependency theory (within th ...

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...

, completing her Ph.D. there in 1977 with a dissertation on ''The Process of Question Answering'', and was hired by Yale as an assistant professor. She moved to the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1982. At Amherst, her doctoral students have included

Claire Cardie Claire Cardie is an American computer scientist specializing in natural language processing. Since 2006, she has been a professor of computer science and information science at Cornell University, and from 2010 to 2011 she was the first Charles ...

and Ellen Riloff. She retired in 2011.

Books

Lehnert has written both scholarly and popular books on computing, including: *''The Process of Question Answering: A Computer Simulation of Cognition'' (L. Erlbaum Associates, 1978) *''Light on the Web: Essentials to Make the 'Net Work for You'' (Addison-Wesley, 1981) *''Strategies for Natural Language Processing'' (with Martin Ringle, L. Erlbaum Associates, 1982) *''The Web Wizard's Guide to Freeware and Shareware'' (Addison-Wesley, 1982) *''Internet 101: A Beginner's Guide to the Internet and the World Wide Web'' (Addison-Wesley, 1998) *''The Web Wizard's Guide to HTML'' (Addison-Wesley, 2001) *''Web 101: Making the Net Work for You'' (with Richard Kopec, Addison-Wesley; 3rd ed., 2007)

Recognition

In 1991, Lehnert was elected as an

AAAI Fellow Fellowship of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (abbreviated as AAAI Fellow or FAAAI) is an award granted to individuals that the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), judged to have made ...

References

External links

Home page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lehnert, Wendy Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American women computer scientists American computer scientists Computational linguistics researchers Portland State University alumni Yeshiva University alumni Yale University alumni Yale University faculty University of Massachusetts Amherst faculty Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Natural language processing researchers Machine learning researchers American women academics 21st-century American women