This past spring I worked on a morphological analyzer for Old English verbs. To my knowledge, this has never been done using finite state transducers. As part of my search to find the current state of the art for this language, I emailed Professor Richard Hogg at the University of Manchester. He wrote the section of the Cambridge History of the English Language on Old English morphology. A lot of times, you’ll email a professor and it could take days for them to get back to you, especially if they are at a different university. Sometimes they don’t respond at all. But, Dr. Hogg was a very polite and helpful guy, saying my work sounded interesting and pointing me to the Stella group at the University of Glasgow. His section on morphology in the Cambridge History was also very helpful, so I felt quite grateful to the guy. I wish I could have known him better.
Read his extensive obituary in the Guardian.
used in my Language and Statistics class. Kemal Oflazer was one of my previous professors, who was visiting CMU last year. He’s done a lot of work with finite state transducers for morphological analysis of Turkish, among other things. Mark Liberman and Aravind Joshi of the University of Pennsylvania are pretty well known and accomplished. Aravind Joshi came up with Tree Adjoining Grammar and both he and Martin Kay won the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award. Mark Steedman is the current president of the ACL (
