Studies in Natural Language Processing: Language, Cohesion and Form

Studies in Natural Language Processing

by Margaret Masterman, Yorick Wilks (Editor)

Margaret Masterman was a pioneer in the field of computational linguistics. Working in the earliest days of language processing by computer, she believed that meaning, not grammar, was the key to understanding languages, and that machines could determine the meaning of sentences. She was able, even on simple machines, to undertake sophisticated experiments in machine translation, and carried out important work on the use of semantic codings and thesauri to determine the meaning structure of texts. This volume brings together Masterman's groundbreaking papers for the first time. Through his insightful commentaries, Yorick Wilks argues that Masterman came close to developing a computational theory of language meaning based on the ideas of Wittgenstein, and shows the importance of her work in the philosophy of science and the nature of iconic languages. Of key interest in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence, it will remind scholars of Masterman's significant contribution to the field.

324 pages, ebook

First published August 12, 2005

About the author

Born in London in 1910, British linguist and philosopher Margaret Mary Masterman was the daughter of Liberal politician and author Charles F.G. Masterman, and poet Lucy Blanche Lyttelton. She was educated at Hamilton House, Tunbridge Wells, at the Institut Britannique in Paris, and at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she studied from 1929-32. She married philosopher Richard Bevan Braithwaite in 1932, and had one son and one daughter.

The author of three novels - one, Gentlemen's Daughters, written while she was a student at Cambridge - Masterman had a varied career, involved in everything from theater and film production, to the creation of philosophical circles ('Epiphany Philosophers') and publications (the journal Theoria to Theory). She lectured for the Moral Sciences Faculty at Cambridge, founded and directed the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU), which would become a major research center in the field computational linguistics, and was a founding Fellow and Vice President of the Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, named after a maternal aunt. Masterman died in 1986.