Margaret Masterman
| Margaret Masterman (Braithwaite) | |
|---|---|
| Born |
4 May 1910 London |
| Died | 1 April 1986 (aged 75) Cambridge |
| Residence | United Kingdom |
| Nationality | British |
| Fields | Computational linguistics |
| Known for | Cambridge Language Research Unit |
| Notes | |
|
Husband: Richard Bevan Braithwaite
|
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Margaret Masterman (4 May 1910 – 1 April 1986) was a British linguist and philosopher, most known for her pioneering work in the field of computational linguistics and especially machine translation.
Margaret Masterman was born in London on 4 May 1910 to Charles F. G. Masterman, a politician, and Lucy Blanche Lyttelton, a politician, poet and writer. In 1932 she married Richard Bevan Braithwaite, a philosopher. They had a son and a daughter.
Margaret Masterman was one of six students in Wittgenstein's course of 1933–34 whose notes were compiled as The Blue Book. In 1955 she founded and directed the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU), which grew from an informal discussion group to a major research centre in computational linguistics in its time. She was a student at Newnham College, Cambridge and read modern languages and then Moral Sciences (as philosophy was then called). The Cambridge Language Research Unit was founded in a small but beautiful building called Adie's Museum which had housed far eastern art: small buddhist sculptures were built into its walls and carved doors. For a period of twenty years from 1953 it was, improbably, a source of significant research in machine translation, computational linguistics, and quantum physics even though outside the official university structures in Cambridge. It was funded by grants from US agencies (AFOSR, ONR, NSF), UK Government agencies (OSTI) and later, from EU funds in Luxembourg. Its computing facilities were primitive—an ancient ICL 1202 computer---and most of its more serious computation was done either on the Cambridge university machine, in the then Mathematical Laboratory—or by CLRU visitors at sites in the US. One measure of its impact, and from a staff that never exceeded ten people, was that of the Annual Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Association for Computational Linguistics in the US, three have been awarded to CLRU alumni: Martin Kay, Karen Sparck Jones and Yorick Wilks.
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