Loading AI tools
Natural language processing researcher From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
William Aaron Woods (born June 17, 1942), generally known as Bill Woods, is a researcher in natural language processing, continuous speech understanding, knowledge representation, and knowledge-based search technology. He is currently a Software Engineer at Google.[10]
William Aaron Woods | |
---|---|
Born | June 17, 1942 |
Alma mater | Ohio Wesleyan University Harvard University |
Known for | KL-ONE[1] Semantic networks Knowledge representation and reasoning[2] |
Awards | Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award[3] |
Scientific career | |
Institutions | Alphabet Sun Microsystems[4] ITA Software BBN Technologies[5][6] ON Technology Applied Expert Systems, Inc.[7] Ohio Wesleyan University Harvard University[8] |
Thesis | Semantics for a Question Answering System (1968) |
Doctoral advisor | Susumu Kuno[9] |
Doctoral students | Steven Salzberg[9] Bonnie Webber[9] Ronald J. Brachman |
Website | www |
Woods received a bachelor's degree from Ohio Wesleyan University (1964) and a Master's (1965) and Ph.D. (1968) in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University, where he then served as an Assistant Professor and later as a Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science.
Woods built one of the first natural language question answering systems (LUNAR) to answer questions about the Apollo 11 Moon rocks for the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center while he was at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN)[5] in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At BBN, he was a Principal Scientist and manager of the Artificial Intelligence Department in the '70's and early '80's. He was the principal investigator for BBN's early work in natural language processing and knowledge representation and for its first project in continuous speech understanding. Subsequently, he was Chief Scientist for Applied Expert Systems and Principal Technologist for ON Technology, Cambridge start-ups. In 1991, he joined Sun Microsystems Laboratories as a Principal Scientist and Distinguished Engineer, and in 2007, he joined ITA Software as a Distinguished Software Engineer. ITA was acquired by Google in 2011, where he now works.
Woods' 1975 paper "What's in a Link"[11] is a widely cited[12] critical review of early work in semantic networks. This paper has been cited in the context of querying and natural language processing approaches that make use of Semantic Networks and general knowledge modeling. The paper attempts to clarify notions of meaning and semantics in computational systems. Woods further elaborated on the issues and how they relate to contemporary systems in "Meaning and Links" (2007).
Woods has received many honors:
Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.
Every time you click a link to Wikipedia, Wiktionary or Wikiquote in your browser's search results, it will show the modern Wikiwand interface.
Wikiwand extension is a five stars, simple, with minimum permission required to keep your browsing private, safe and transparent.