William A. Woods

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William Aaron Woods , called Bill Woods, (born June 17, 1942 ) is an American computer scientist ( artificial intelligence , natural language processing).

Woods studied at Ohio Wesleyan University with a bachelor's degree in 1964 and at Harvard University with a master's degree in applied mathematics in 1965 and a doctorate in computer science with Susumo Kuno in 1968 (Semantics for a Question Answering System). In 1967 he became an assistant professor at Harvard University. In 1970 he went to Bolt Beranek and Newman , where he was Principal Scientist in the Artificial Intelligence department from 1976 to 1983. From 1983 to 1988 he was Chief Scientist of Applied Expert Systems and from 1988 for ON Technology (founded by Mitch Kapor the year before ). From 1985 he was also Professor of Practical Computer Science at Harvard. From 1991 he was Principal Scientist and Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems . From 2007 he was with ITA Software (a software company founded in 1996 for the aviation and travel industry), and when it was acquired by Google in 2010 he was there too.

From 1978 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Sussex and 1974/75 Lecturer at MIT.

Woods built one of the first natural language question-and-answer systems at BBN, called LUNAR, because it was based on the Apollo 11 lunar rock samples. In addition to processing natural language, he dealt with knowledge representation (semantic networks, participation in the development of KL-ONE by his doctoral student Ronald Brachman at BBN from the end of the 1970s) with the understanding of continuously spoken language under aspects of AI. He also dealt with knowledge-based search technology.

In 1973/74 he was president of the Association for Computational Linguistics, of which he is a fellow. He is also a fellow of the AAAI and the American Association for the Advancement of Science .

Fonts (selection)

  • Transition network grammars for natural language analysis , Communications of the ACM, Volume 13, 1970, No. 10, p. 591.
  • with RM Kaplan, BL Nash-Webber: The Lunar Sciences Natural Language Information System: Final Report , BBN Report No. 2378, Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge, June 1972
  • with A. Newell, Chairman a. a .: Speech-Understanding Systems: Final Report of a Study Group , North-Holland / American Elsevier, 1973.
  • An Experimental parsing System for Transition Network Grammars , in: R. Rustin (Ed.), Natural Language Processing, New York: Algorithmics Press, 1973.
  • Progress in Natural Language Understanding: An Application to Lunar Geology , AFIPS Conference Proceedings 42 (1973 National Computer Conference and Exposition).
  • What's in a Link: Foundations for Semantic Networks , in: D. Bobrow, A. Collins (Eds.), Representation and Understanding: Studies in Cognitive Science, New York: Academic Press, 1975.
  • Procedural Semantics as a Theory of Meaning , in: A. Joshi, BL Webber, I. Sag (Ed.), Elements of Discourse Understanding, Cambridge University Press, 1981.
  • Optimal Search Strategies for Speech Understanding Contro , Artificial Intelligence, Volume 18, 1982, pp. 295-326
  • What's Important About Knowledge Representation ?, IEEE Computer, Volume 16, 1983, No. 10
  • Artificial Intelligence , in Lisa Taylor (Ed.), The Phenomenon of Change, New York: Rizzoli, 1984.
  • Editor with Frank Fallside: Computer Speech Processing , Prentice-Hall International 1985.
  • Understanding Subsumption and Taxonomy: A Framework for Progress, in: John Sowa (Ed.), Principles of Semantic Networks: Explorations in the Representation of Knowledge, Morgan Kaufmann, 1991, pp. 45-94.
  • Conceptual Indexing: A Better Way to Organize Knowledge, Technical Report SMLI TR-97-61, Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Mountain View, CA, April, 1997.
  • Aggressive Morphology for Robust Lexical Coverage, Proceedings of ANLP-2000, Seattle, WA, May 1-3, 2000
  • with Lawrence A. Bookman, Ann Houston, Robert J. Kuhns, Paul Martin, Stephen Green: Linguistic Knowledge can Improve Information Retrieval, Proceedings of ANLP-2000 (Applied Natural Language Processing Conference), Seattle, WA, May 1-3, 2000
  • Searching vs. Finding, ACM Queue, Volume 2, No. 2, 2004
  • Meaning and Links: a Semantic Odyssey, AI Magazine, Volume 28, No. 4, 2007

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Career data based on American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  2. ↑ William A. Woods in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / id used
personal data
SURNAME Woods, William A.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Woods, Bill; Woods, William Aaron
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American computer scientist
DATE OF BIRTH June 17, 1942