Fred Jelinek

Fred Jelinek (18 November 1932 – 14 September 2010) was a researcher in information theory, automatic speech recognition, and natural language processing. Quotes Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of our speech recognition system goes up. Although its fame and iconic status are undisputed, the quip's context is unknown and its specific wording and dating are unclear. In a presentation, Jelinek claimed it was "Whenever I fire a linguist our system performance improves" and it came from a talk "Applying Information Theoretic Methods: Evaluation of Grammar Quality Workshop on Evaluation of NLP Systems", Wayne PA, December 1988. According to Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin, Jelinek himself recalled the quote as "Anytime a linguist leaves the group the recognition rate goes up" and dated it to December 1988 (Wayne, Pennsylvania), further noting that the quote did not appear in the published proceeding. Jurafsky Daniel James H. Martin 2009 Speech and language processing: an introduction to natural language processing, computational linguistics, and speech recognition 2nd Prentice Hall series in artificial intelligence Upper Saddle, New Jersey Prentice Hall 0-13-187321-0 83 Palmer Martha Tim Finin 1990 Report on the Workshop on the Evaluation of Natural Language Processing Systems Computational Linguistics 16 1 171–185 http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~finin//papers/acl90.pdf Roger K. Moore gave the wording as "Every time we fire a phonetician/linguist, the performance of our system goes up" and dated it to an IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding workshop held in 1985. Moore Roger K. 2005 Results from a Survey of Attendees at ASRU 1997 and 2003 INTERSPEECH-2005 Lisbon, September 4-8, 2005 https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/pdfs/interspeech_2005/moore05_interspeech.pdf It is generally believed that scientific talent reveals itself in early youth. [...] This was certainly not my case. I somehow slid into my scientific profession. My mother wished for me to become a physician, just like my father. [...] I myself wanted to be a lawyer, defender of the unjustly accused. But my career is the result of political circumstances, academic possibilities, and lucky accidents. Talking about his life in a 2001 speech Jelinek, Frederick. "How I Got Here" Charles University, Prague, Czechoslovakia (November 22, 2001). Retrieved on December 17, 2010. Honoris causa degree acceptance speech. It's easier to say something stupid than write something stupid. Quotes about Jelinek He was not a pioneer of speech recognition, he was the pioneer of speech recognition. Steven Young, 2010, "Frederick Jelinek 1932–2010: The Pioneer of Speech Recognition Technology". Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee Newsletter External links Category:Academics from the Czech Republic Category:Academics from the United States Category:Immigrants to the United States Category:Computer scientists from the United States Category:1932 births Category:2010 deaths Category:Jews from the Czech Republic Category:Jews from the United States Category:Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Category:Cornell University faculty Category:Harvard University faculty Category:Johns Hopkins University faculty