Obituary
Martin Kay
Ronald M. Kaplan
Hans Uszkoreit
German Research Center for Artificial
Intelligence (DFKI)
Giance
It is with great sadness that we report the passing of Martin Kay in August 2021. Martin
was a pioneer and intellectual trailblazer in computational linguistics. He was also a
close friend and colleague of many years.
Martin was a polyglot undergraduate student of modern and medieval languages
at Cambridge University, with a particular interest in translation. He was not (yet)
a mathematician or engineer, but idle speculation in 1958 about the possibilities of
automating the translation process led him to Margaret Masterman at the Cambridge
Language Research Unit, and a shift to a long and productive career.
In 1960 he was offered an internship with Dave Hays and the Linguistics Project at
The RAND Corporation in California, another early center of research in our emerging
discipline. He stayed at RAND for more than a decade, working on basic technologies
that are needed for machine processing of natural language. Among his contributions
during that period was the development of the first so-called chart parser (Kay 1967),
a computationally effective mechanism for dealing systematically with linguistic de-
pendencies that cannot be expressed in context-free grammars. The chart architecture
could be deployed for language generation as well as parsing, an important property
for Martin’s continuing interest in translation.
It was during the years at RAND that Martin found his second calling, as a teacher
of computational linguistics, initially at UCLA and then in many other settings. He was
a gifted and entertaining speaker and lecturer, able to present complex material with
clarity and precision. He took great pleasure in the interactions with his students and the
role that he played in helping to advance their careers. He left RAND in 1972 to become
a full-time professor and chair of the Computer Science Department at the University
of California at Irvine.
His time at Irvine was short-lived, as he was attracted back to an open-ended
research environment. In 1974 he joined with Danny Bobrow, Ron Kaplan, and Terry
Winograd to form the Language Understander project at the recently created Palo
Alto Research Center (PARC) of the Xerox Corporation. The group took as a first goal
the construction of a mixed-initiative dialog system using state-of-the-art components
for knowledge representation and reasoning, language understanding, language pro-
duction, and dialog management (Bobrow et al. 1977). Martin took responsibility for
https://doi.org/10.1162/COLI a 00424
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Computational Linguistics
Volume 48, Number 1
the language production module, which was initially based on the quite rudimentary
technology of the time.
That was the beginning of his focus on “reversible grammars,” grammatical
rules and representations that could be applied to parse strings into their underlying
syntactic representations but also convert underlying representations back to the strings
that express them. He and his colleagues at PARC developed the idea of hierarchical
attribute-value structures (feature/functional structures) as underlying representations
that could be characterized by the primitive predicates of equality and unification. This
insight took form in his Functional Unification Grammar (Kay 1979) and in Lexical
Functional Grammar (Kaplan and Bresnan 1982), and it also surfaced in the design of
Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard and Sag 1987).
Reversibility, for translation as well as dialog, was also the motivation at PARC for
developing the mathematical, linguistic, and computational concepts that led to the use
of bi-directional finite-state transducers for phonological and morphological description
(Kaplan and Kay 1994). This technology is still being applied to a wide variety of
language processing problems. But for Martin translation was always a central theme,
bracketed by his early article “The Proper Place of Men and Machines in Language
Translation” (which circulated in research for quite some time before it was finally
published [Kay 1997]) and his most recent book (Kay 2017).
In 1985 Martin struck a new balance between his commitment to research and
his love of teaching by officially dividing his time between his prestigious role as a
Research Fellow at PARC and a professorship in the Linguistics Department at Stanford.
In addition to his Stanford professorship, he also taught (1998–2014) as an Honorary
Professor at Saarland University, offering one or two courses every year. During his
stays in Germany, he also advised on ongoing research, and his lectures and discussions
helped in the gradual integration of programs in linguistics, computational linguistics,
and translation studies.
Martin contributed in many other ways to international progress in compu-
tational linguistics. In the 1970s and later he was a mainstay lecturer in the In-
ternational Summer Schools in Computational Linguistics in Italy, and the Nordic
summer schools in Scandinavia (actually, he and his wife Iris hosted one Nordic
summer school at their home in Menlo Park). He advised research organizations
and projects in several countries. He was a specialist advisor to the German Min-
istry of Education and Research, a reviewer for the two largest European projects
in automatic translation, Eurotra and Verbmobil, and a valued advisor for projects
at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). He also served
for many years as chairman of the International Committee for Computational
Linguistics (ICCL).
Martin received many honors during his lifetime. He is a past President of the
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). In 2005 he received the ACL Lifetime
Achievement Award (Kay 2006). He was awarded honorary doctorate degrees from
the University of Gothenburg (1982) and the University of Geneva (2008). He was the
recipient of the Okawa Prize in 2019.
Martin’s quiet and modest style of personal interaction stood only in apparent
contrast to his widely recognized fame as an intellectual leader. His impressive exper-
tise in several disciplines and his diverse intellectual interests made him a wonderful
conversation partner for colleagues and friends who were lucky enough to be able to
spend time with him. All students and colleagues remember him as a gifted speaker
who was able to captivate and convince his audience with excellent didactics, rhetorical
sharpness, and his very own sense of humor.
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Kaplan and Uszkoreit
Martin Kay
We also remember Martin’s wife, Iris Kay, who predeceased him by a few months.
Iris was a warm and psychologically insightful figure who played a prominent role in
the early social history of computational linguistics, when personal relationships were
more immediate and so important. They will both be sorely missed.
References
Bobrow, Daniel G., Ronald M. Kaplan,
Martin Kay, Donald A. Norman, Henry
Thompson, and Terry Winograd. 1977.
GUS, a frame-driven dialog system.
Artificial Intelligence, 8:155–173. Reprinted
in Grosz et al. (1986), pages 595–604.
https://doi.org/10.1016/0004-3702
(77)90018-2
Dalrymple, Mary, Ronald M. Kaplan, John T.
Maxwell, III, and Annie Zaenen, editors.
1995. Formal Issues in Lexical-Functional
Grammar. CSLI Publications, Stanford, CA.
Flickinger, Dan and Stephan Oepen, editors.
2010. Collected Papers of Martin Kay. CSLI
Publications, Stanford University.
Grosz, Barbara, Karen Sp¨arck Jones, and
Bonnie Webber, editors. 1986. Readings in
Natural Language Processing. Morgan
Kaufman, Los Altos, CA.
Kaplan, Ronald M. and Joan Bresnan. 1982.
Lexical-Functional Grammar: A formal
system for grammatical representation.
In Joan Bresnan, editor, The Mental
Representation of Grammatical Relations. MIT
Press, Cambridge, MA, pages 173–281.
Reprinted in Dalrymple et al. (1995,
98–111).
Kaplan, Ronald M. and Martin Kay. 1994.
Regular models of phonological rule
systems. Computational Linguistics,
20(3):331–378.
Kay, Martin. 1967. Experiments with a
powerful parser. In Proceedings of the
Second International Conference sur le
Traitement Automatique des Langues,
pages 1–20. Reprinted in Flickinger and
Oepen (2010), pages 98–111.
Kay, Martin. 1979. Functional grammar. In
Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the
Berkeley Linguistics Society, pages 142–158,
Berkeley Linguistic Society, Berkeley, CA.
Reprinted in Flickinger and Oepen (2010),
pages 247–264. https://doi.org/10.3765
/bls.v5i0.3262
Kay, Martin. 1997. The proper place of men
and machines in language translation.
Machine Translation, 12(1):3–23. https://
doi.org/10.1023/A:1007911416676
Kay, Martin. 2006. A life of language.
Computational Linguistics, 31(4):425–438.
https://doi.org/10.1162
/089120105775299159
Kay, Martin. 2017. Translation, CSLI
Publications, Stanford, CA.
Pollard, Carl and Ivan A. Sag. 1987.
Information-based Syntax and Semantics:
Vol. 1: Fundamentals. Center for the Study
of Language and Information, Stanford
University.
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