Martha (Stone) Palmer | |
Fields: | Computer Science Natural Language Processing Computational Linguistics |
Workplaces: | University of Pennsylvania University of Colorado Boulder |
Thesis Title: | Driving semantics for a limited domain |
Thesis Url: | http://hdl.handle.net/1842/26831 |
Thesis Year: | 1985 |
Doctoral Advisor: | Alan Bundy |
Known For: | PropBank VerbNet |
Awards: | ACL Fellow (2014) AAAI Fellow (2020) |
Martha (Stone) Palmer is an American computer scientist. She is best known for her work on verb semantics,[1] and for the creation of ontological resources such as PropBank[2] and VerbNet.[3]
Palmer received a Master of Arts in Computer Science from University of Texas at Austin in 1976, advised by Robert Simmons.[4]
She received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1985. Her thesis was titled "Driving semantics for a limited domain", and was advised by Alan Bundy.[5]
Palmer is currently a professor of computer science and linguistics at the University of Colorado Boulder.[6] [7] She was previously on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania.[8]
Palmer served as president of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2005[9] and was named an ACL Fellow in 2014 "for significant contributions to computational semantics and the development of semantic corpora".[10]
In 2017, she was awarded the Helen & Hubert Croft Professorship by the University of Colorado.[11] In the same year, the university named her a "Professor of Distinction", a title reserved for professors who have received international recognition for their research.[12] She was elected an AAAI Fellow in 2020 "for significant contributions to natural language processing and knowledge representation, including widely-used corpora of annotated structures in several languages".[13] In 2023, she was awarded the ACL Lifetime achievement award, the highest distinction by the Association for Computational Linguistics, for her lifetime work on verb semantics.