Adam Kilgarriff (12 February 1960 – 16 May 2015) was a corpus linguist,

lexicographer Lexicography is the study of lexicons, and is divided into two separate academic disciplines. It is the art of compiling dictionaries. * Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionaries. * Theoretica ...

, and co-author of

Sketch Engine Sketch Engine is a corpus manager and text analysis software developed by Lexical Computing CZ s.r.o. since 2003. Its purpose is to enable people studying language behaviour ( lexicographers, researchers in corpus linguistics, translators or lan ...

Life

His parents were booksellers. He spent one year as a volunteer in Kenya 1978–1979 then began studying at

Cambridge University The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III of England, Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world' ...

, graduating with a first class BA degree in philosophy and engineering in 1982. His first job was as a Housing Officer for the

London and Quadrant L&Q (London & Quadrant Housing Trust) is a housing association operating in Greater London, the South East, East Anglia, and parts of the North West (under its subsidiary company Trafford Housing Trust). L&Q's registered office is based in Strat ...

Housing Trust. At the same time he studied at the South West London College. In 1987, he left his job and started an MSc in intelligent knowledge-based systems at the

University of Sussex , mottoeng = Be Still and Know , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £14.4 million (2020) , budget = £319.6 million (2019–20) , chancellor = Sanjeev Bhaskar , vice_chancellor = Sasha Roseneil , ...

, from where he graduated the following year, continuing a DPhil in computational linguistics with thesis Polysemy (1992). In 2008 he made a return trip to Kenya with his old friend Raphael. He was also a participant in the Hastings Half Marathon for many years. In November 2014, he was diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer which he succumbed to in May 2015. After the diagnosis he started his own blog where he reflected on his experience with the disease and thoughts on language, corpus linguistics and life, and the world in general.

Research and career

He graduated from

(PhD, 1992) and became a lecturer at the

University of Brighton The University of Brighton is a public university based on four campuses in Brighton and Eastbourne on the south coast of England. Its roots can be traced back to 1858 when the Brighton School of Art was opened in the Royal Pavilion. It achiev ...

in 1995. Later he was a visiting research fellow in Department of Informatics at the

and in School of Modern languages and Cultures at the

University of Leeds , mottoeng = And knowledge will be increased , established = 1831 – Leeds School of Medicine1874 – Yorkshire College of Science1884 - Yorkshire College1887 – affiliated to the federal Victoria University1904 – University of Leeds , ...

. The partnership with B.T.S. Atkins (Sue Atkins) and Michael Rundell brought setting up his first company Lexicography MasterClass Ltd in 2002. This company provided consultancy and training in lexicography and dictionary production. Shortly after the retirement of Sue Atkins, the company was dissolved in 2012. In 2003, he started his own company Lexical Computing Limited delivering tools and services in corpus processing. He himself has been working as a lexicographer for a short period (1992–1995) at the

Longman Longman, also known as Pearson Longman, is a publishing company founded in London, England, in 1724 and is owned by Pearson PLC. Since 1968, Longman has been used primarily as an imprint by Pearson's Schools business. The Longman brand is also ...

Dictionaries. His early research career was closely associated with

word sense disambiguation Word-sense disambiguation (WSD) is the process of identifying which sense of a word is meant in a sentence or other segment of context. In human language processing and cognition, it is usually subconscious/automatic but can often come to consc ...

(PhD thesis above). Kilgarriff argued against discrete classification of word senses and saw word senses rather as a continuous space of meanings largely defined by the contexts in which a word appears. His paper "I don't believe in word senses" (1997) became soon a state-of-the-art argumentation on the topic. The work on polysemy brought Kilgarriff to text corpora and corpus linguistics to which he devoted the rest of his career. He was one of the founding members and former chair (2006–2008) of the Special Interest Group on Web as Corpus (SIGWAC) of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and also one of the founding organizers of

SENSEVAL SemEval (Semantic Evaluation) is an ongoing series of evaluations of computational semantic analysis systems; it evolved from the Senseval word sense evaluation series. The evaluations are intended to explore the nature of meaning in language. ...

. In the years 2000–2004, he was the president of the Special Interest Group on the Lexicon (SIGLEX) of the ACL. Kilgarriff was an active member of the European Association for Lexicography (member of board 2002–2006), consultant for major publishing houses and reviewer for journals and conferences around that field.Adam Kilgarriff's Curriculum Vitae
/ref> He has been working on methods for automatic acquisition of large web corpora and quantitative and qualitative corpus analysis (text genres, corpus similarity, homogeneity and heterogeneity). His work on corpora was closely connected with their application for computer

lexicography Lexicography is the study of lexicons, and is divided into two separate academic disciplines. It is the art of compiling dictionaries. * Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionaries. * Theoreti ...

. Kilgarriff invented the notion of word sketches, one-page summaries of a word's collocation behaviour in particular grammatical relations, which represent the core part of the Sketch Engine corpus management system.

References

External links

Adam Kilgarriff's home pageAdam Kilgarriff's profile on Google ScholarStructured Bibliography of Adam Kilgarriff written by himself
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kilgarriff, Adam Linguists from the United Kingdom 1960 births 2015 deaths Alumni of the University of Sussex Academics of the University of Brighton Academics of the University of Leeds Corpus linguists Computational linguistics researchers English lexicographers Deaths from colorectal cancer