Ralph Grishman

Ralph Grishman
Alma mater	Columbia University (PhD in physics)
Known for	Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, Information Extraction
Awards	Fellow of the Association of Computational Linguistics (2017), ACL Lifetime Achievement Award (2024)
Scientific career
Fields	computational linguistics, computer science
Institutions	New York University, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
Doctoral students	Carol Friedman, Heng Ji, Satoshi Sekine, Roman Yangarber
Website	Website @ New York University

Ralph Grishman is an American computer scientist and professor at New York University's Courant Institute. ^[1] He is known for his work in computational linguistics, natural language processing (NLP), and for helping establish Information Extraction (IE) in NLP. Grishman's contributions were recognized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), the international body promoting research in computational linguistics, with its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2024. ^{[2] [3]}

Career

Early in his career, Grishman worked with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, where he served as a Member of the ARPA Speech & Natural Language Standing Committee (1992-1994) and as Chair of the DARPA TIPSTER Program Phase II Architecture Working Group from 1994 to 1998.

In 1990, Grishman served as Vice President of the international Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), ^[4] and was elected President of the ACL in 1991. ^[5]

From 2010 to 2016, Grishman worked with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and as the organizer of the Text Analysis Conference.

Grishman has acted as a program chair and a member of executive committees for numerous conferences of the ACL and its various chapters. ^[6] In 2017, he was elected a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics . ^{[7] [8]} In 2024, he was awarded the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award. ^[9]

Research

Ralph Grishman's work covers a range of problems in the field of computational linguistics and natural language processing. ^[10]

Information extraction

Grishman has done a lot of work in the field of Information Extraction and was one of the original designers and contributors to the MUC competitions (MUCs). His ‘‘Proteus’’ system ^[11] achieved high performance among more than 20 international participants — including universities and companies — at the Sixth MUC Competition (MUC-6), ^[12] specifically in the ‘‘Scenario Template’’ task, which represented the most complex challenge evaluated at MUC-6. ^[13]

Other areas of NLP

Grishman worked on the Linguistic String Project, ^[14] led by Naomi Sager.

He has published in areas including information extraction, machine learning, machine translation, syntactic parsing, and syntactic treebanks for natural languages. His work appears in the proceedings of computer science conferences, including the meetings of the Association for Computational Linguistics and EMNLP. ^[15]

His published monographs include a textbook on Computational Linguistics. ^[10]

References

1. "Ralph Grishman". cs.nyu.edu. Retrieved 2025-04-22.
2. "ACL Home Page: ACL Lifetime Achievement Award Recipients". www.aclweb.org. Retrieved 2025-01-08.
3. "ACL Lifetime Achievement Award for 2024. New York University news". cs.nyu.edu. Retrieved 2025-01-08.
4. "ACL Vice President and Executive Committee (1990)". aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php. Retrieved 5 February 2020.
5. "ACL President and Executive Committee (1991)". aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php. Retrieved 5 February 2020.
6. "ACL Elected Officers". aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php. Retrieved 5 February 2020.
7. "ACL Fellows". aclweb.org/aclwiki/ACL_Fellows. Retrieved 5 February 2020.
8. "News & Events: Ralph Grishman has been named a Fellow of the Association of Computational Linguistics" . Retrieved 5 February 2020.
9. "ACL Lifetime Achievement Award Recipients - Admin Wiki". www.aclweb.org. Retrieved 18 May 2025.
10. Ralph Grishman (1986). Computational Linguistics: an Introduction (PDF). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Retrieved 2023-09-11.
11. Grishman, Ralph (November 6–8, 1995). "The NYU system for MUC-6 or where's the syntax?" (PDF). Sixth Message Understanding Conference (MUC-6). scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2023-09-11.
12. "MUC-6, the sixth in a series of Message Understanding Conferences" . Retrieved 2023-09-11.
13. Grishman, Ralph; Sundheim, Beth (1996). "Message Understanding Conference-6: A Brief History" (PDF). The 16th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. Retrieved 2023-09-11.Sundheim, Beth (1995). "Overview of Results of the MUC-6 Evaluation" (PDF). Sixth Message Understanding Conference (MUC-6). Retrieved 2023-09-11.
14. "MLP Natural Language Processor". cs.nyu.edu. Retrieved 2025-05-29.
15. "dblp: A Case Study on Learning a Unified Encoder of Relations". dblp.uni-trier.de. Retrieved 2025-05-16.