Ronald Kaplan

Ronald M. Kaplan (born 1946) is a Vice President at Amazon.com and Chief Scientist for Amazon Search (A9.com). He was previously Vice President and Distinguished Scientist at Nuance Communications. Prior to that he served as Chief Scientist and a Principal Researcher at the Powerset division of Microsoft Bing. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Linguistics Department at Stanford University and a Principal of Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI). He was previously a Research Fellow at the Palo Alto Research Center (formerly the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center), where he was the manager of research in Natural Language Theory and Technology.

He received his Bachelor's degree (1968) in Mathematics and Language Behavior from the University of California, Berkeley and his Master's (1970) and Ph.D. (1975) in Social Psychology from Harvard University. As a graduate student he investigated how explicit computational models of grammar, particularly Augmented Transition Networks, could be embedded in models of human language performance, and he wrote the grammar for the LUNAR system, the first large-scale ATN grammar of English. He also developed the notions of consumer-producer and active-chart parsing. He designed (in collaboration with Joan Bresnan) the formal theory of Lexical Functional Grammar and produced its initial computational implementation. He developed (with Martin Kay) the mathematical, linguistic, and computational concepts that underlie the use of finite-state phonological and morphological descriptions.

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