Dan Jurafsky
Dan Jurafsky is an associate professor in the
Department of Linguistics,
and by courtesy in the
Department of Computer Science,
at
Stanford University,
where he arrived in 2004.
Dan was born in Yonkers, New York, and grew up in Los
Altos, California, where he attend Los Altos High School. He received his B.A in Linguistics in 1983, and his Ph.D.
in Computer Science in 1992, both from UC Berkeley.
Between these degrees, Dan worked as a software engineer
in UNIX operating systems (virtual memory subsystem and TCP/IP
and Ethernet drivers), in user interface design, and probabilistic algorithms
for distributed file system synchronization.
After his Ph.D. work (on probabilistic/computational models
of the psycholinguistics of human parsing) he spent 4 years working as
a postdoctoral researcher with
Nelson Morgan
and
Jerry Feldman
at the
International
Computer Science Institute,
working especially
on the integration of stochastic context-free-grammar (SCFG) LMs into decoders
for automatic speech recognition,
on probabilistic rules for pronunciation in spontaneous speech,
and playing drums in the jazz band Too Many Notes.
Dan then worked for 8 years at the
University of Colorado at Boulder,
where he was an Assistant and Associate Professor in the
Department of Linguistics,
the Institute of
Cognitive Science, the
Department of Computer Science,
and the
Center for Spoken Language Research.
Dan still maintains an adjunct position at the University of Colorado,
and continues to work closely with colleagues there.
Dan's research focuses
on statistical models of human and machine language processing,
especially computational linguistics, automatic speech recognition and
understanding, computational psycholinguistics, and natural language
processing. He received the National Science Foundation CAREER award
in 1998, the MacArthur Fellowship in 2002, and also has high hopes for
his recipe for Three Cups Chicken. His most recent book, with James H.
Martin, is the widely-used textbook "Speech and Language Processing";
he and Jim are currently working on a second edition and will both
be very happy when it's done, hopefully by the end of the summer.
Dan also plays the drums (lately in Dead Tongues) and can sometimes be found
on stage playing corpses (Gianni Schicchi), fools
(Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night), loudmouths (Buzz Adams in South Pacific),
showoffs (MC in Guys and Dolls), drunks
(Frosch the jailer in Die Fledermaus) or butlers
(Lane in The Importance of Being Earnest). Any resemblance to real life is purely accidental.
Here's a picture of Dan with Peter Sells.
And here's a picture
from the COLING-02 conference in Taipei, Taiwan.
