Premio a la Trayectoria
Martha Palmer and Barbara Di Eugenio
Interview Martha Evens
Martha Evens
Martha Palmer preamble: Several of us can remember Martha Evens clearly as a calm,
smiling presence at ACL conferences in the 1990s and early 2000s. We knew she was
an expert on lexicons and lexical databases—and some of us knew she had been a
long serving SIGLEX officer from 1992 a 2004 in various capacities and that she was
doing something in the esoteric area of medical informatics, which was pretty much
uncharted territory in those days. But mostly we knew she was always interested in
what we were doing, asking us about what we were presenting, complimenting us
on recent publications, inquiring about our families, and making us feel welcomed
and part of the community. Few of us knew that when she graduated Bryn Mawr
summa cum laude with a degree in Mathematics in 1955 along with three other women,
she had also added German and Greek to the Latin and French she had learned in
high school. She was clearly destined for computational linguistics, although the first
ACL conference was still 7 years away. After studying more mathematics in Paris as
a Fulbright Scholar, she enrolled in a master’s program in Mathematics at Harvard/
Radcliffe and graduated in 1957. Her eventual husband Len Evens pointed her to an
opening as a programmer working with Oliver Selfridge at MIT Lincoln Labs. Allá
she found herself contributing to the first spelling correction program and was imme-
diately hooked on the challenges of using computers to process language. She drove
the two boxes of cards containing the first LISP interpreter from MIT to Lincoln Labs
as a favor to a friend, not realizing that she would later use LISP extensively herself.
She still speaks reverently of her time there with Oliver Selfridge and his continuing
influence. Eleven years of marriage and three children later, with her husband settled in
a tenured position at Northwestern, she decided to go back to graduate school to study
Computer Science at Northwestern. When she received her Ph.D. en 1975, she joined
the Illinois Institute of Technology. She had already worked on a Mandarin Chinese
parser at Berkeley in the 1960s, so her commitment to natural language processing was
long established. In addition to her work on lexicons, she pioneered the development
of intelligent tutoring systems for medical topics, and her tutoring system focusing
on the circulatory system, called CIRCSIM-Tutor, was used by hundreds of medical
students over several years at three different medical schools. She was a co-editor of
https://doi.org/10.1162/coli a 00453
© 2022 Asociación de Lingüística Computacional
Publicado bajo una Atribución Creative Commons-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 4.0 Internacional
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Ligüística computacional
Volumen 48, Número 4
the precursor of Computational Linguistics from 1981 a 1984, president of ACL in 1984,
and on the Cambridge University Press editorial board for the NLP series from 1982 a
1990. Yet at conferences, she never referred to her professional roles or in any way threw
her weight around. She just stayed focused on how best to teach and serve her students
and the community. She organized a number of conferences in artificial intelligence and
went along to many others with her students, to ensure that as many of them as possible
could present papers—and she had a lot of students. In her 25 plus years at IIT, she
supervised over 100 Doctor. students and taught every computer science course on the
books except for hardware. In the words of the former Illinois Tech Computer Science
chair Eunice Santos, “Martha is very well-known as someone who put her heart into
being there to help students. She is very much loved. She is also an incredibly humble
persona. You’ll learn more about what Martha has done from everybody else than you
will from her.” Today we have a rare opportunity to learn a little bit from her. Enjoy.
Interview
Martha Palmer (MP): This is so richly deserved and definitely should have happened
sooner but we are really glad we are still able to talk to you about your research and
your whole career and the experiences you have had.
Martha Evens (MWE): Thank you for the opportunity. I am so delighted to receive this
award. I never thought this would happen, especially since I’ve been out of research
for so long.
Barbara Di Eugenio (BDE): Martha, we would really like to know how you got started
in natural language processing.
MWE: Right. I majored in Mathematics at Bryn Mawr and graduated in 1955. I got a
Fulbright and spent a year in Paris learning more mathematics and went home to study
even more mathematics at Harvard. I got a Master’s in Mathematics from Radcliffe. Mi
first day at Harvard, a man named Leonard Evens was sitting on the front steps, greeting
the new Mathematics graduate students and showing them around the department.
Over that year, we saw each other a lot, and he suggested I try to get a summer job
at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where he had worked in the summer of 1956. I was hired
there as a mathematician and, by incredible luck, my supervisor for the summer was
Oliver Selfridge. That was the summer when the first copy of the Fortran compiler
that left IBM arrived at MIT, so he had me learn to program. He asked me to write a
spelling correction program for the Morse code messages, which were full of errors,
that the Navy was getting from all over the Pacific. Several years later our program
became the first widely available spelling program. Oliver hired me for the next few
summers, también. He was very supportive and helpful when I finally applied to graduate
school in Computer Science. In the meantime, I got married to Len Evens in 1958 y
we produced three wonderful children, and my husband became a tenured Professor
of Mathematics at Northwestern after spending some time at University of Chicago
y Berkeley. Berkeley was one of the first universities to have a strong Linguistics
Departamento, and while we lived there, I went to their colloquia and read some of the
textbooks they used in their courses. Len encouraged me to go back to graduate school
in computer science when our youngest child started school. Although I’d been going
to listen to some people at the University of Chicago talk about computer science, nosotros
thought it would be cheaper and more manageable for me to go to Northwestern.
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Evens
Martha Palmer and Barbara Di Eugenio Interview Martha Evens
Northwestern did not yet have a Department of Computer Science, but I knew I
wanted to work with Gilbert Krulee, who was then chair of the Engineering Man-
agement Department, so I filled out an application for Engineering Management and
started that program part-time in 1969. En 1971, Northwestern created a Department of
Computer Science with Krulee as department chair, and I moved over along with him.
En el momento, Northwestern had a policy of not supporting married female graduate
estudiantes, but I taught courses in computer science for Northwestern and was able to pay
my tuition that way. For my Ph.D. tesis, I wrote a program that was able to read and
interpret children’s stories, and could answer multiple choice test questions about the
stories correctly. The program also could tell students whether their answers to the test
were correct, and if their answers were incorrect, it could explain to them why the right
answer was correct. Based on this work, I got my Ph.D. at Northwestern in Computer
Science in 1975. Robert Dewar was leaving the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) a
chair the NYU Department of Computer Science that year, and I applied for a position
at IIT and was hired. Computer Science was also relatively new at IIT, and I was the
first professor hired at IIT with a Ph.D. in Computer Science. Alrededor 1973, Krulee
had moved to head Northwestern’s new Department of Linguistics, and this led me
to start talking more to people in linguistics, En particular, Professors Raoul Smith
and Oswald Werner (who was also in Anthropology) but also Judith Markowitz and
Bonnie Litowitz, who were graduate students in Linguistics. The five of us wrote a
book together,1 published in 1980, and I wrote other papers in NLP with members of
this group. This research group helped me develop as a researcher in the years imme-
diately after my Ph.D. My wonderful husband was always very supportive of my
trabajar, and he came home early to watch our children so I could go to seminars in the
Department of Linguistics at Northwestern. I ended up staying at IIT until I retired
en 2001, but they let me keep my laboratory until 2010, and I continued to work with
students until then.
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BDE: I’m really interested in asking you about CIRCSIM-Tutor, but I also want to
point out to the NLP/ACL crowd that you have been a pioneer in AI in education as
well and in using natural language processing in that context of education. You were
certainly one of the main movers behind CIRCSIM-Tutor, which is one of the first,
if not the first, intelligent tutoring system that modeled conversations between the
teacher and the students, and tried to look at various features like the student taking
the initiative, and what kinds of questions they asked, etcétera. So I wanted to ask
you how you started on that project, and what challenges you faced. These days AI
is widely accepted, especially in health care. Now they want people in NLP to make
progress, but when you started this work in the late 1980s and early 1990s, this was
not the state of research. So we’d like to hear what you have to say about how you got
started on CIRCSIM-Tutor, the challenges you faced, and the satisfactions you found.
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[CIRCSIM-Tutor was a pioneer Intelligent Tutoring System to teach cardiovascular physiology;
most relevant, it conducted a natural language interaction with the student, using tutoring
strategies employed by expert human tutors.2 Evens and her group collected and carefully ana-
lyzed human–human tutoring interactions in this domain, and investigated a variety of tutoring
1 Evens, METRO., B. Litowitz, j. Markowitz, R. Herrero, and O. Werner. 1980. Lexical-Semantic Relations: A
Comparative Survey, Linguistic Research, Cª, Edmonton, Alberta.
2 Evens, METRO. y j. Miguel. 2006. One-on-One Tutoring by Humans and Machines. Erlbaum, Mahwah, Nueva Jersey.
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Volumen 48, Número 4
strategies and student behaviors, including differences between face-to-face and computer-
mediated tutoring sessions; the usage of hinting and of analogies on the part of the tutor; tomando
initiative on the part of the students; and several domain-based teaching techniques, Por ejemplo,
at which level of knowledge to teach. All of these strategies were implemented, and several were
evaluated in careful experiments. CIRCSIM-Tutor was shown to engender significant learning
gains, and was used in actual classes, which is even more striking since the NLP technologies
available at the time were severely limited. For further details, please see Di Eugenio et al.3]
MWE: Sí, en 1976 a cardiologist named Daniel Hier, who was working at Michael
Reese Hospital a few blocks from the IIT campus, called me to ask if there was some
way we could write a program that would input a patient’s cardiac symptoms and
suggest diagnoses; we did that, and wrote several papers based on that program. Después
Michael Reese closed down, Dan moved to University of Illinois Medical Center and
hired one of my students to work there. Some doctors at Chicago Medical School
including David Trace contacted Daniel and asked him about using computers in
medicine, and he suggested they talk to me. My students and I collaborated with
David Trace and others at Chicago Medical School to write a software system called
MEDAS that explained diagnoses to a patient and suggested possible treatments, gave
discharge instructions, and created a patient database. Chicago Medical School is now
called Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine, and is in the far northern suburbs
de chicago, so it was a bit of a drive to go there, but well worth it. When I went
allá, I met Frank Naeymi-Rad, who was their head computer administrator, and Tim
Koschman, a computer scientist there. Frank and Tim got interested in the work we
were doing and later got Ph.D.s at IIT working with me. Tim played a key role in
developing MEDAS and Frank got doctors interested in medical informatics and later
started a company in this field that has done very well. I wrote a number of programs
with Frank and Tim and with other students to expand and improve MEDAS, y
I think of MEDAS as a kind of great grandmother to the EPIC medical informatics
sistema.
MP: And I understand you had a lot of Ph.D. students—a hundred? How did you
manage that? You must have been supervising 10 students at a time or 15, or even 20
all at once. How in the world did you do that?
MWE: Sí, how did I manage? Remember that these students were spread out over 30
years or more. I had several group meetings every week, and when I went home, I often
took a thesis draft or a paper home to edit, and spent the evening making comments
or suggesting changes. You know, just teaching computer science has been a lot of
fun because the students are so excited. In the 1960s, I spent several years teaching
mathematics at National College of Education (now Lewis University) to students
training to be elementary school teachers, many of whom really hated mathematics.
I enjoyed that, but in a very different way. A diferencia de, my computer science students
were full of enthusiasm and very talented. They did excellent work and figured out
how to talk to doctors and did most of the real work, and I got to put my name on
their papers.
3 Di Eugenio, B., D. Fossati, y N. Verde. Intelligent Support for Computer Science Education: Pedagogy
Enhanced by Artificial Intelligence. CRC Press, 2021.
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Evens
Martha Palmer and Barbara Di Eugenio Interview Martha Evens
MP: A lot of your students got their Ph.D.s in things other than natural language
processing or medical applications of natural language processing.
MWE: My first few Ph.D. students were students left behind by Robert Dewar, and their
theses were related to compilers or databases. Sin embargo, almost all the rest wrote their
theses on natural language processing or lexical databases. De hecho, Yo tenía 17 estudiantes
write theses adapting some of what we had learned about natural language processing
in English to Arabic. I learned a little Arabic in the process, but not at all well. Nosotros
learned a lot about Arabic linguistics, and then the same thing happened in Korean
y chino. So we would have CIRCSIM-Tutor meetings once a week and Arabic and
Korean meetings also.
MP: Yeah, I know what that’s like. I’ve done that too. You seemed to go to a lot of
conferences. For conferences that were not too far away, did you drive? Did you take a
bunch of students together to the conferences? Did you have a van?
MWE: No, but one of my students did. De hecho, one of my students drove a taxi to make
ends meet.
MP: But I think none of them are taxi drivers now! A lot of your students are professors
at universities, or CEOs of companies, or deans, or even one I think is the president of
a university. Is that right?
MWE: Sí, they worked hard and did good work. They learned a lot and were very
excited about their research. It was just a whole lot of fun.
MP: So, how many of them worked on CIRCSIM-Tutor?
MWE: Oh, dear. I’m not sure.
MP: Just roughly, 25 o 50?
MWE: Well, Michael Glass did a lot of that work. Michael is now teaching and helping
to run computer science at Valparaiso University. He played a key role in building the
Computer Science department there. Frank Naeymi-Rad added a lot of the medical
vocabulary.
BDE: Can I say something about Michael? He was my postdoc for two years, y
my most cited paper is a joint paper with Michael, about the squib on the intercoder
agreement on Kappa.4 Sorry about bringing up my own work but it’s to Martha’s
credit that her graduate students were so good.
MWE: Well, Michael was an undergraduate student at the University of Chicago and
he started doing computational linguistics there, so he knew a lot before he came to me.
Since then, he has been experimenting with mathematics tutoring programs and has
4 The Kappa coefficient of intercoder agreement [cohen, j. 1960. A coefficient of agreement for nominal
escamas. Educativo & Psychological Measurement, 20: 37–46]; [Di Eugenio, Barbara, and Michael Glass. 2004.
The kappa statistic: A second look. Ligüística computacional, 30(1):95–101].
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Ligüística computacional
Volumen 48, Número 4
done a lot of good work along with Jung Hee Kim, who is now a Professor at North
Carolina State.
MP: So you’ve also done a lot of work with lexical databases. You wrote a book on this
subject that just got reprinted not that long ago.5 Did you find that the work with lexical
databases was useful for the intelligent tutoring systems like CIRCSIM-Tutor?
MWE: De hecho, I edited two books on lexical databases and wrote parts of them also.
Sí, an intelligent tutoring system needs to know a lot about language. It needs to
understand a lot of words to handle questions that students ask and to try to encourage
them to keep going, or whatever is needed, and that takes a lot of vocabulary. CIRCSIM
was actually invented not by me but by two professors at Rush School of Medicine,
Joel Michael and Allen Rovick. Joel and Allen had difficulties teaching medical students
in a required first year physiology course how to solve problems in medicine, y eso
took a lot of time to help each student individually, so they asked me if we could
write a tutoring system which would help students work through these difficulties.
We took recordings of a lot of one-on-one tutoring sessions between Joel and Allen
and their students. Based on these, we did a lot of complicated planning to address
communication problems between students and the tutoring system, and we tried a
number of different ways to address these issues. en el proceso, we learned that usually
having two medical students work together with the tutoring system worked best in
práctica. Reva Freedman, who is now a Computer Science Professor at Northern Illinois
Universidad, did a lot of the planning and Michael Glass did most of the parsing.
MP: And the system was actually used at Rush Medical School? For how long?
MWE: Well, as long as Joel and Allen were still teaching there at least. Había
others at Rush who started using CIRCSIM-Tutor after Joel and Allen retired, también.
One of my students, Tim Koschman, taught at Southern Illinois Medical School using
CIRCSIM-Tutor, so it was used some there, but I don’t know for how long, or how
many students used it. After I retired from teaching at IIT, Joel and I wrote a book about
the system.
MP: But at Rush, aunque, there must have been hundreds of students who used the sys-
tem over several years? That’s quite a record for a natural language processing system,
especially a tutoring system. Barbara, do you know of any comparable applications?
BDE: The only ones that come to mind are the database tutoring systems from the
Tanya Mitrovic group in New Zealand, but they came much later; likewise for the Auto-
Tutor series of ITSs on introductory Computer Science (University of Memphis) or the
Atlas-Andes ITS on physics (University of Pittsburgh)—interestingly, Reva Freedman
contributed to the NLP component of the latter. So that’s why I think CIRCSIM-Tutor
was really the first tutoring system that took natural language processing seriously.
MP: And that was actually used successfully over a long period of time.
5 Evens, METRO., editor. 1988/2009. Relational Models of the Lexicon: Representing Knowledge in Semantic Networks.
Prensa de la Universidad de Cambridge.
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Evens
Martha Palmer and Barbara Di Eugenio Interview Martha Evens
MWE: Sí, we also used it for summer students studying physiology.
MP: Were there any moments when you were working on that system or another
system when things just seemed to go horribly wrong, and you despaired of whether
or not you’d ever be able to get it to work?
MWE: Sí, en efecto. Sin embargo, thanks largely to Frank Naeymi-Rad, we knew that the
systems we had written earlier worked. Joel and Allen’s students got really interested
in the program and helped us by telling us about problems and making suggestions
about adding vocabulary and plans.
MP: So they helped you beta test?
MWE: Sí, they told us when there were bugs in the program, so yes, it was very
helpful.
MP: Sí, that’s right. Getting somebody to use a tutor is always a big advantage.
MWE: Well, the students who used the system liked it and that helped. A lot.
MP: It sounded like you’ve really enjoyed your Ph.D. estudiantes. Was that the most
satisfying part of being a computer science professor?
MWE: Oh, Bueno, I don’t know whether it’s still true but at that point the people
who were studying computer science were really excited about it. I enjoyed teaching
compiler courses especially.
MP: Sí, you seemed to teach just about everything. I mean a lot of us teach artificial
intelligence and natural language processing, but you also taught compilers and
programming languages, and I think algorithms. Was there anything you didn’t teach?
Did you just teach most of the computer science curriculum?
MWE: Oh, I didn’t teach any hardware courses. My husband knew hardware and
played a major role in setting up the computer network at the Northwestern Depart-
ment of Mathematics. My husband handled all the hardware at home until he died a
year and a half ago.
MP: It’s very handy to have a built-in hardware tech at the house. Everybody in my
house keeps thinking I’m supposed to do that. So, let’s go back to lexical databases.
One of the issues with using pre-existing lexical databases is that quite often the system
users will come up with new terminology or new phrases for something and it’s hard
to match those with the existing entries. Do you have any ideas about that? How did
you handle that issue in your tutoring system?
MWE: Sometimes we had to ask the students what unfamiliar words meant.
MP: Get the users to repeat what they said or phrase it a little differently? And then
did you continually try to update the system? Were you constantly putting in new
phrases, taking phrases that initially the system had not understood and then adding
them in?
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MWE: Well, Sí, and some dictionaries try to do that, también. We would buy a new edition
of Webster’s and the Cambridge dictionaries every time they were available. Si nosotros
could get them to send us something before it was printed, that was great, because they
were starting to build their dictionaries on the computer, también, so they were interested in
what we were doing.
MP: So then while your system was being used, were you and your students in a
constant state of updating and maintaining it?
MWE: I was very fortunate to get to know several professional lexicographers from
around the world, and they invited me to their conferences, which were mostly held in
the area around Toronto or in other places in Canada, and that was great for helping us
update our systems. These interactions led me to edit the book Relational Models of the
Lexicon: Representing Knowledge in Semantic Networks.
BDE: Martha, you were a pioneer as a woman in mathematics and computer science.
You already told us a little bit at the beginning how you got started in the field. But as
one of the very few women in the field, especially at the beginning, do you have any
thoughts on the experience? What was the most frustrating part for you? What was the
funniest moment that you encountered in the 1980s?
MWE: In the 1980s in the IIT Department of Computer Science we had at one time as
many women taking the master’s exam in computer science as men. The exact same
numbers, as it happened. It only happened once, but I think at that point a lot of
early work on compiling lists and building databases was done by women, and IIT
encouraged me to have programs every semester for women who might want to do
computer science. The Department of Computer Science was in Engineering some of
the time and at other times in Arts and Sciences. Computer science was a kind of
engineering that people could do without needing much physical strength or doing
something dangerous, and I think that attracted a lot of women to computer science.
Fortunately, at the time there was a broad push to get more women into computer
ciencia.
MP: What was the hardest part? Did you ever have a moment when you felt like a door
was shut in your face because you were a woman instead of a man?
MWE: In the other engineering departments, it happened sometimes and mechanical
engineering people were particularly unenthusiastic, I think. They actively told women
students interested in mechanical engineering to go away and the administration com-
plained when they heard about it.
MP: I bet they did.
MWE: I just kept telling the people in that department that they were losing a lot of
good students that way.
MP: That’s a good response. Did anything funny ever happen, like somebody knew you
were Professor Evens but they didn’t realize you were a woman?
MWE: Oh, Sí, that certainly happened. People often assumed that I was a secretary
and then there were people who had to be told several times that I had a Ph.D. Cuando
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Evens
Martha Palmer and Barbara Di Eugenio Interview Martha Evens
I was hired, I was the only woman faculty member in the Department of Computer
Science at IIT, but after about five years happily there were more. In the 1980s, nosotros
persuaded a lot of women to study computer science, but unfortunately since then the
percentage of women students in computer science at IIT has declined to some degree.
MP: What makes you happiest about your career and the work you’ve done?
MWE: Happiest? Well, all the students from all over the world, getting to know them,
and seeing their excitement, and helping them develop their ideas. Their excitement
made me feel good and helped keep me going.
BDE: OK, Martha, as a final question for you, would you have words of wisdom for
young researchers in natural language processing today?
MWE: I had a lot of luck. When I was starting, a lot of people were excited about what
they were doing and passed some of that excitement on to me. I have learned a lot
from linguists as well as from computer scientists. I’ve had a lot of luck, beginning with
getting connected to Oliver Selfridge.
MP: That was a good start.
MWE: When my husband was teaching at Berkeley, Oliver visited several times to give
talks in linguistics, and I was able to talk to him during these visits. That helped me
connect to linguistics research there, and the same thing happened later in the Chicago
área. Oliver made a point of getting coffee with me when he came, and that was really
encouraging.
MP: So maybe your advice would be to find a great mentor.
BDE: And always be enthusiastic and excited about your research.
MWE: Find something that you can get excited about and then think about ways to
communicate that excitement to others.
MP: Well, Martha, thank you so much. Thank you for spending time with us today.
But thank you even more for your long illustrious career, including your 100 Doctor.
estudiantes, your fielded systems, your 300-odd publications and all of the contributions
you’ve made to the field, both as a researcher and also as a sterling example of what it
means to dedicate your life to your teaching and your students.
BDE: I couldn’t say it better.
MWE: Thank you so much. Thank you both.
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