Richard H. Richens

Richard H. Richens was the inventor of semantic nets for computers. While at the Cambridge Language Research Unit, in 1956 he created semantic nets as an "interlingua" for machine translation of natural languages. He was Director of the Commonwealth Bureau of Plant Breeding and Genetics 1964-1979 (also at Cambridge), which was part of the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux, and he pioneered the creation of its bibliographic database. He was an expert on elms, publishing many papers on the subject.

References

• R.H.Richens: General program for mechanical translation between any two languages via an algebraic interlingua [Abstract]. In: Report on research: Cambridge Language Research Unit. Mechanical Translation 3 (2), November 1956; p. 37.

• R.H.Richens: Preprogramming for mechanical translation. Mechanical Translation 3 (1), July 1956; pp. 20–25

• R.H.Richens: 'Elm'. Cambridge University Press, 1983; 347 pp.