James Frederick Allen (born 1950) is an American computational linguist recognized for his contributions to temporal logic, in particular Allen's interval algebra. He is interested in knowledge representation, commonsense reasoning, and natural language understanding, believing that "deep language understanding can only currently be achieved by significant hand-engineering of semantically-rich formalisms coupled with statistical preferences".[2] He is the John H. Dessaurer Professor of Computer Science at the University of Rochester[3]
James Frederick Allen | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1950 (age 73–74) |
| Alma mater | University of Toronto (Ph.D., 1979) |
| Known for | TRIPS (An Integrated Intelligent Problem-Solving Assistant) PLOW (A Collaborative Task Learning Agent) |
| Awards | AAAI Fellow (1990, Founding) [1] |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Artificial Intelligence Natural Language Processing & Understanding Computational Linguistics |
| Institutions | University of Rochester IHMC |
| Thesis | A plan-based approach to speech act recognition (1979) |
| Academic advisors | C. Raymond Perrault |
| Notable students | Garrison Cottrell Henry Kautz Diane Litman |
| Website | www |
Biography edit
Allen received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1979, under the supervision of C. Raymond Perrault,[4][5][6] after which he joined the faculty at Rochester.[7] At Rochester, he was department chair from 1987 to 1990, directed the Cognitive Science Program from 1992 to 1996, and co-directed the Center for the Sciences of Language from 1996 to 1998.[7] He served as the Editor-in-Chief of Computational Linguistics from 1983–1993.[7][8][9] Since 2006 he has also been associate director of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.[7][10]
Academic life edit
TRIPS project edit
The TRIPS project is a long-term research to build generic technology for dialogue (both spoken and 'chat') systems, which includes natural language processing, collaborative problem solving, and dynamic context-sensitive language modeling. This is contrast with the data driven approaches by machine learning, which requires to collect and annotate corpora, i.e. training data, firstly.[11]
PLOW agent edit
PLOW agent is a system that learns executable task models from a single collaborative learning session, which integrates wide AI technologies including deep natural language understanding, knowledge representation and reasoning, dialogue systems, planning/agent-based systems, and machine learning. This paper won the outstanding paper award at AAAI in 2007.[12]
Selected works edit
Books edit
Allen is the author of the textbook Natural Language Understanding (Benjamin-Cummings, 1987; 2nd ed., 1995).[13][14]
He is also the co-author with Henry Kautz, Richard Pelavin, and Josh Tenenberg of Reasoning About Plans (Morgan Kaufmann, 1991).[15]
Articles edit
- 2007. PLOW: A Collaborative Task Learning Agent. (with Nathanael Chambers et al) AAAI'07
- won the outstanding paper award at AAAI in 2007.
- 2006. Chester: Towards a Personal Medication Advisor. (with N. Blaylock, et al) Biomedical informatics 39(5)
- 1998. TRIPS: An Integrated Intelligent Problem-Solving Assistant. (with George Ferguson) AAAI'98
- 1983. Maintaining Knowledge about Temporal Intervals. CACM 26, 11, 832-843
Awards and honors edit
In 1991 he was elected as a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (1990, founding fellow).[1][16]
References edit
- ^ a b AAAI FELLOWS
- ^ James F. Allen homepage on Rochester
- ^ Faculty listing Archived 2010-06-25 at the Wayback Machine, linguistics department, Rochester University, retrieved 2011-01-05.
- ^ ACM Digital Library entry for Allen's thesis, A plan-based approach to speech act recognition, retrieved 2011-01-05.
- ^ AI Genealogy Project Archived 2011-07-20 at the Wayback Machine, retrieved 2011-01-05.
- ^ James Francis Allen at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
- ^ a b c d e Curriculum vitae Archived 2006-09-06 at the Wayback Machine, retrieved 2011-01-05.
- ^ Some Notes on ACL History, Karen Sparck Jones, 2002, retrieved 2011-01-05.
- ^ Computational Linguistics Archived 2011-05-27 at the Wayback Machine, Julia Hirschberg, 2002, retrieved 2011-01-05.
- ^ Profile at IHMC, retrieved 2011-01-06.
- ^ TRIPS: An Integrated Intelligent Problem-Solving Assistant, AAAI'98
- ^ PLOW: A Collaborative Task Learning Agent, AAAI'07
- ^ Review by Michael Kac Archived 2011-06-29 at the Wayback Machine (1988), Computational Linguistics 14 (4): 96–97.
- ^ [Review by Mona Singh] (1996), ACM Computing Reviews.
- ^ Review by Mitchell Marks and Kristian J. Hammond (1993), ACM SIGART Bulletin 4 (2): 8–11, doi:10.1145/152941.1064726.
- ^ "Fellows of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence", AI Magazine, 11 (4): 13–14, 1990