Eugene Charniak

Eugene Charniak (June 2, 1946 to June 13, 2023) was an American computer scientist born in Chicago, Illinois, known for statistical approaches to natural language parsing. He earned an AB in physics from the University of Chicago and a PhD in computer science from MIT under Marvin Minsky, then spent his career as a professor of computer science and cognitive science at Brown University. His early research addressed language understanding, knowledge representation and reasoning under uncertainty, and from the early 1990s he concentrated on statistical techniques for natural language processing, including part of speech tagging, probabilistic context free grammar induction, syntactic disambiguation, efficient parsing algorithms and lexical resource acquisition. He was named a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and, in 2011, received the Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award and the Calvin and Rose G. Hoffman Prize and was elected an ACL Fellow; in 2015 the AAAI gave his 1997 paper Statistical Parsing with a Context-Free Grammar and Word Statistics its Classic Paper Award. He died in Providence, Rhode Island, in 2023.