Communications of the ACM
Barbara Grosz Receives 2017 ACL Life Time Achievement Award
The Association for Computational Linguistics has awarded its 2017 ACL Lifetime Achievement Award to Barbara Grosz.
Credit: Association for Computational Linguistics
During its 55th annual meeting in Vancouver, Canada (July 30 - August 4, 2017), the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) awarded its 2017 ACL Lifetime Achievement Award to professor Barbara Grosz.
Grosz is Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. She received her undergraduate degree in Mathematics from Cornell University and her master's and doctoral degrees in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley. Prior to joining Harvard as professor in 1986, she held positions at SRI International and Stanford University. She has also held visiting positions at the University of Pennsylvania; Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and Brown University.
Grosz has made seminal contributions to the fields of natural language processing and multi-agent systems. She established the research field of computational modeling of discourse and, with Candy Sidner, developed a theory of discourse structure that specifies how discourse interpretation depends on interactions among speaker intentions, attentional state, and linguistic form. With Julia Hirschberg she used the theory to study the use of intonation to convey information about discourse structure, for instance how tones demark, in spoken language, some of the structure that paragraphs and parentheses indicate in written language. She also developed some of the earliest computer dialogue systems. Professor Grosz's work on models of collaboration helped establish that field and has provided the framework for several collaborative multi-agent and human-computer interface systems. Her current research focuses on exploring ways collaborative multi-agent systems, collaborative interfaces and natural-language processing methods can enhance medical care and education. She is particularly interested in using models of collaboration to improve the systems patients and physicians use for health care planning and communication.
From Association for Computational Linquistics
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