History of Speech and Language Technology

Lauri Karttunen is a computational linguist at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and a Consulting Professor in Linguistics at Stanford University. He received his doctorate in Linguistics in 1969 from Indiana University, and taught semantics at the University of Texas at Austin from 1969 until 1983. His interest in computational linguistics dates from his last years at the University of Texas, where he developed his 1983 KIMMO system using two-level morphology. At SRI from 1984 to 1987, Karttunen worked on unification and parsing. In recent years, he has been working on finite-state technology and its linguistic applications. He has also returned to issues of semantics, particularly regarding issues of local textual inference.

Additional information on Professor Karttunen can be found at:
http://www2.parc.com/istl/members/karttune/
and at:
http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/k/Karttunen:Lauri.html

An interview was conducted with Professor Karttunen at MIT on July 21, 2005, by Dr. Janet Baker. The text of this interview has not yet been transcribed, but a brief excerpt of the recorded interview is available.

Brief excerpt of recorded interview.