Lauri Karttunen

Lauri Karttunen is a Consulting Professor in Linguistics at Stanford and an ACL Fellow.

Karttunen received his Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1969 from Indiana University in Bloomington. At the University of Texas at Austin in the 1970s he worked mostly on semantics. He published a series of seminal papers on discourse referents, presuppositions, implicative verbs, conventional implicatures, and questions. In the 1980s Karttunen became, along with Ronald M. Kaplan, Martin Kay, and Kimmo Koskenniemi, one of the pioneers in computational linguistics on the application of finite-state transducers to phonology and morphology. Karttunen and Kenneth R. Beesley published a textbook on Finite State Morphology and a set of applications for creating morphological analyzers. Commercial versions of the finite-state technology developed by Karttunen and his colleagues at PARC and XRCE have been licensed by Xerox to many companies including SAP and Microsoft. Karttunen retired from PARC in 2011. He is currently working on Language and Natural Reasoning at CSLI.

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) gives each year at its Annual Meeting a "Lifetime Achievement Award." At the age of 66, Karttunen became so far the youngest recipient of the award at the 45th Meeting in Prague in 2007. In 2009 the Indiana Linguistics Department gave Karttunen a Distinguished Alumni Award. In 2011 ACL created an ACL Fellows Program. Karttunen was one of the seventeen selected for the founding group of ACL Fellows "whose contributions to the field have been most extraordinary." The European META-NET organization awarded Karttunen's XFST (Xerox Finite-State Toolkit) application a META-Seal of Recognition at the 2012 Meeting in Brussels "for software products and services that actively contribute to the European Multilingual Information Society."

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