Frederick Jelinek

Frederick Jelinek
Born
Bedřich Jelínek

(1932-11-18)November 18, 1932
Kladno, now Czech Republic
DiedSeptember 14, 2010(2010-09-14) (aged 77)
Baltimore, United States
CitizenshipAmerican
Alma materMassachusetts Institute of Technology
Known forAdvancement of natural language processing techniques
SpouseMilena Jelinek
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsInformation theory, natural language processing
InstitutionsCornell University, IBM Research, Johns Hopkins University
Doctoral advisorRobert Fano
Notable studentsNeil Sloane

Frederick Jelinek (18 November 1932 – 14 September 2010) was a Czech-American researcher in information theory, automatic speech recognition, and natural language processing. He is well known for his oft-quoted statement, "Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up".[note 1]

Jelinek was born in Czechoslovakia before World War II and emigrated with his family to the United States in the early years of the communist regime. He studied engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and taught for 10 years at Cornell University before accepting a job at IBM Research. In 1961, he married Czech screenwriter Milena Jelinek. At IBM, his team advanced approaches to computer speech recognition and machine translation. After IBM, he went to head the Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University for 17 years, where he was still working on the day he died.

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