Ronald M. Kaplan

Ronald M. Kaplan (born 1946) is an American computer scientist specializing in computational linguistics and natural language processing. He has served as vice president at Amazon.com and chief scientist for Amazon Search, and previously as vice president and distinguished scientist at Nuance Communications; he is also an adjunct professor in the Linguistics Department at Stanford University and a principal of Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information. He is recognized for designing Lexical Functional Grammar with Joan Bresnan, for developing consumer-producer and active-chart parsing concepts, and for work with Martin Kay on finite-state phonological and morphological models; he authored the grammar for LUNAR, described as the first large-scale augmented transition network grammar of English. He served as a research manager at Xerox PARC overseeing Natural Language Theory and Technology research and helped embed finite-state methods into commercial products at Xerox and spin-off companies including Microlytics, Inxight and Scansoft. He received the Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019 and has been an ACL Fellow since 2011, having served as the association's president in 1979.