Language, Cohesion and Form

Studies in Natural Language Processing

by Margaret Masterman, Yorick Wilks (Editor)

As a pioneer in computational linguistics, working in the earliest days of language processing by computer, Margaret Masterman believed that meaning, not grammar, was the key to understanding languages, and that machines could determine the meaning of sentences. This volume brings together Masterman's groundbreaking papers for the first time, demonstrating the importance of her work in the philosophy of science and the nature of iconic languages. This book will be of key interest to students of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence.

324 pages, Hardcover

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.