Yorick Wilks
| Yorick Wilks | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
27 October 1939 United Kingdom |
| Residence | United kingdom |
| Nationality | British |
| Fields |
Artificial Intelligence Natural Language Processing |
| Institutions |
University of Sheffield University of Oxford |
| Alma mater | University of Cambridge |
| Thesis | Argument and proof in metaphysics from an empirical point of view (1968) |
| Doctoral advisor | R. B. Braithwaite |
| Known for | General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE) |
| Notable awards | Loebner Prize (1997); The biennial Antonio Zampolli Prize by the European Language Development Association at LREC (2008); The Lifetime Achievement Award at the ACL (2008); The British Computer Society's Lovelace Medal (2009) |
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Website staffwww |
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Yorick Wilks FBCS (born 27 October 1939) is a British Computer Scientist who is Professor of Artificial Intelligence (Emeritus) at the University of Sheffield, a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, and a Senior Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. He is a member of the Epiphany Philosophers.
Wilks was educated at Torquay Boys' Grammar School, followed by Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he joined the Epiphany Philosophers and obtained his Doctor of Philosophy degree (1968) under Professor R. B. Braithwaite for the thesis 'Argument and Proof'; he was an early pioneer in meaning-based approaches to the understanding of natural language content by computers. His main early contribution in the 1970s was called "Preference Semantics" (Wilks, 1973; Wilks and Fass, 1992), an algorithmic method for assigning the "most coherent" interpretation to a sentence in terms of having the maximum number of internal preferences of its parts (normally verbs or adjectives) satisfied. That early work was hand-coded with semantic entries (of the order of some hundreds) as was normal at the time, but since then has led to the empirical determinations of preferences (chiefly of English verbs) in the 1980s and 1990s.
A key component of the notion of preference in semantics was that the interpretation of an utterance is not a well- or ill-formed notion, as was argued in Chomskyan approaches, such as those of Jerry Fodor and Jerrold Katz. It was rather that a semantic interpretation was the best available, even though some preferences might not be satisfied. So, in "The machine answered the question with a low whine" the agent of "answer" does not satisfy that verb's preference for a human answerer—which would cause it to be deemed ill-formed by Fodor and Katz—but is accepted as sub-optimal or metaphorical, and, now, conventional. The function of the algorithm is not to determine well-formedness at all but to make the optimal selection of word-senses to participate in the overall interpretation. Thus, in "The Pole answered..." the system will always select the human sense of the agent and not the inanimate one if it gives a more coherent interpretation overall.
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