Language Log

Since the death of Neil Armstrong on Saturday, many remembrances have told the story about his famously flubbed first words on the moon. From Ian Crouch on The New Yorker's News Desk blog:

When the lunar module, named the Eagle, touched down, following moments of radio silence that terrified the folks back in mission control, he relayed: “Houston: Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” Later, as he made his way out of the lunar module (or LM), he described his progress in banal terms that, because of where they were coming from and what they conveyed, rose to the level of magic: “I’m going to step off the LM now.” And then he issued what is among the most famous proclamations of the last century—a jubilant counterbalance to F.D.R.’s “Day of Infamy” speech and a capstone to J.F.K.’s declaration that “we choose to go to the moon”—a statement that Armstrong had composed and prepared just hours earlier, in between the more pressing business of operating space equipment, according to Armstrong’s biographer, James Hansen: “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”

One of the random things I happened to notice yesterday, in a list of people who passed away in 2011, was the name of Leonard Stern, co-creator of Mad Libs. (Back in 2008, Arnold Zwicky marked the game's 50th anniversary here on Language Log.) For those who've never seen it, Mad Libs is a word game in which one player prompts a second player for a list of words — give me a noun; ok, now an adjective; ok, now another noun, etc. — where the kinds of words needed are determined by labeled blanks that are situated in a little story that only the first player can see. In the second step of the game, the two players read the story together with the words inserted in their proper positions. The very first Mad Libs gave the following as an example:

 "_____________! he said ________ as he jumped into his convertible
exclamation              adverb
______ and drove off with his __________ wife."
 noun                            adjective

(Footnote: I've borrowed the example from the game's Wikipedia entry.)

Thinking about Mad Libs last night after a bedtime conversation with my six year old, I've concluded that someone really needs to design a linguistics course entirely around Mad Libs.

On November 7, publishers Reed Elsevier announced the passing of Pierre Vinken, former Reed Elsevier CEO and Chairman, at age 83. But to those of us in natural language processing, Mr. Vinken is 61 years old, now and forever.

Though I expect it was unknown to him, Mr. Vinken has been the most familiar of names in natural language processing circles for years, because he is the subject (in both senses, not to mention the inaugural bigram) of the very first sentence of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) corpus:

Pierre Vinken, 61 years old, will join the board as a nonexecutive director Nov. 29.

But there's a fascinating little twist that most NLPers are probably not aware of. I certainly wasn't.

It's possible that you don't know who Dennis Ritchie was. Even if you do, you should read some of his obituaries, and think about the ways in which he changed the world: Steve Lohr, "Dennis Ritchie, Trailblazer in Digital Era, Dies at 70", NYT; Elizabeth Flock, "Dennis Ritchie, father of C programming language and Unix, dies at 70", Washington Post; Cade Metz, "Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On", Wired News; Mark Memmott, "Dennis Ritchie, C Programmer And Unix Co-Creator, Has Died", NPR.

Johnny Truant, commenting on that last piece, contributed a tribute that Dennis would have appreciated:

#include "stdio.h"
int main(void)
{
printf("goodbye, world\n");
return 0;
}

(Though everyone who knew Dennis, or who knows what he did for the world, would object to that return value.)

Max Mathews died yesterday morning.  For his 80th birthday in 2007, CCRMA's MaxFest described his contributions this way:

Fifty years ago, in 1957, at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Max Mathews demonstrated that the digital computer can be used as a fantastic new music instrument. He created a revolutionary software platform destined to form the basis of all contemporary digital musical systems (Music 1–Music 5).

His audacious ideas were driven by the belief that "any sound that the human ear can hear can be produced by a computer". Mathews's mastery of this new instrument revealed new musical horizons and sparked a burgeoning curiosity into the very nature of sound. His comprehension and elaboration made five decades of art and research possible, laying the groundwork for generations of electronic musicians to synthesize, record, and play music.

Today at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) as a Professor Emeritus he continues not only to educate students and colleagues, but also to guide and inspire with his constant inventiveness and pure musical pleasure.

Join us in honoring Max for two evenings of sound, celebration and discovery of his ideas, works, music, and writings.

[Update: a memorial page for Bill, to which people can contribute thoughts, pictures, etc., can be found here.]

It saddens me greatly to report that William F. Shipley passed away on January 20, 2011. He was 89 years old. Bill was my first linguistics professor, my first advisor and mentor, my first academic collaborator, and my dear, dear friend. I already miss him more than I am able to put into words.

Bill completed his dissertation under the direction of Mary Haas at UC Berkeley in 1959, a grammar of the Native California language Maidu (published in the University of California Publications in Linguistics series in 1964, with a dictionary and texts published in 1963). In 1966, he left an appointment at Berkeley to be among the very first faculty to participate in the big experiment that UC Santa Cruz was at the time, and he retired from UCSC in 1991.

From the Ohio State department's memorial page:

Ilse was born on January 31, 1922 in Tallinn, Estonia, but left Estonia as a refugee in 1944, fleeing the Soviet invasion of her homeland. She earned her first Ph.D., in Philology, from the University of Hamburg in 1948 and a second Ph.D., in Linguistics, from the University of Michigan in 1959. In 1963, Ilse joined the faculty at The Ohio State University. Ilse came to OSU from the University of Michigan, after receiving her Ph.D., and spending 1959-63 at the Communication Sciences Laboratory as Research Associate. At Ohio State, she divided her time between phonetics, historical linguistics, and administration, serving as Chair 1965-71, Acting Chair 1984-85, and again Chair 1985-87.  In fact, she was the Department's first Chair (1965-1971) when it was founded in 1965, after having spent two years in the Slavic Department. Professor Emeritus since 1987.

Ilse enjoyed a long and distinguished career.  She was the author, co-author or editor of 20 books, about 200 articles and over 100 reviews. Ilse was honored in many ways for her immense contributions to the field of linguistics. At The Ohio State University, she was awarded the title of Distinguished University Professor and received the University Distinguished Scholar Award, the university's highest recognition for scholarly achievement. She also held four honorary doctorates from Essex University, England (1977), the University of Lund, Sweden (1982), Tartu University, Estonia (1989), and The Ohio State University (1999). She was Foreign Member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences since 1998, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1990, and Foreign Member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences (2008).

Arnold's news yesterday about Ilse Lehiste's passing was a sad coda to Christmas.  What a tremendous loss to the field of linguistics — Ilse's exuberant reactions to all things linguistic made her a joy to be around

News from Brian Joseph: our colleague and dear friend Ilse Lehiste, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Ohio State University, died on Christmas Day, of complications from pneumonia.

Back on September 15, when I posted the news of Fred Jelinek's death, I promised to say more when I'd had a chance to think about it. Then, a few days later, Robert Dale asked me to write an obituary for Fred to be published in the Computational Linguistics journal. The December 2010 issue is now out, and Fred's obituary is here.

Following Robert's suggestion, I aimed at a broad assessment of Fred's impact on the field, since CL recently published Fred's own detailed account of his professional life ("The Dawn of Statistical ASR and MT", CL 35(4):483-494 , 2009).

Following on the announcement of the death of my dear friend Ellen Prince (here), I'm now passing on three further death announcements from recent days: sociolinguist Faye Vaughn-Cooke and lexicographers Fred Mish and Sol Steinmetz.

A note from the Penn Linguistics Department, written by Gillian Sankoff and Tony Kroch:

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of our colleague Ellen F. Prince. Ellen died peacefully at home in Philadelphia on Sunday, October 24, after a long battle with cancer.

On October 1, Partha Niyogi died of brain cancer at the age of 43.  He was Louis Block Professor in Computer Science and Statistics at the University of Chicago, and on his web page, he tells us that

My research interests are generally in the field of artificial intelligence and specifically in pattern recognition and machine learning problems that arise in the computational study of human speech and language.