Frederick Jelinek
| Frederick Jelinek | |
|---|---|
| Born | Bedřich Jelínek November 18, 1932 Kladno, now Czech Republic |
| Died | September 14, 2010 (aged 77) Baltimore, United States |
| Citizenship | American |
| Fields | Information theory, natural language processing |
| Institutions | Cornell University, IBM Research, Johns Hopkins University |
| Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Doctoral advisor | Robert Fano |
| Notable students | Neil Sloane |
| Known for | Advancement of natural language processing techniques |
| Influences | Roman Jakobson |
| Notable awards |
|
| Spouse | Milena Jelinek |
Frederick Jelinek (18 November 1932 – 14 September 2010) was a Czech-American researcher in information theory, automatic speech recognition, and natural language processing. He is well known for his oft-quoted statement, "Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up".
Jelinek was born in Czechoslovakia just before the outbreak of World War II and emigrated with his family to the United States in the early years of the communist regime. He studied engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and taught for 10 years at Cornell University before being offered a job at IBM Research. In 1961, he married Czech screenwriter Milena Jelinek. At IBM, his team advanced approaches to computer speech recognition and machine translation. After IBM, he went to head the Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University for 17 years, where he was still working on the day he died.
Jelinek was born on November 18, 1932, as Bedřich Jelínek in Kladno to Vilém and Trude Jelinek. His father was Jewish; his mother was born in Switzerland to Czech Catholic parents and had converted to Judaism. Jelinek senior, a dentist, had planned early for an escape to England; he arranged for a passport, visa, and the shipping of his dentistry materials. The couple planned to send their son to an English private school. However, Vilém decided to stay at the last minute and was eventually sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where he died in 1945. The family was forced to move to Prague in 1941, but Frederick, his sister and mother—thanks to the latter's background—escaped the concentration camps.
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