Synopses & Reviews
Yorick Wilks is a central figure in the fields of Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence. This book celebrates Wilks's career from the perspective of his peers in original chapters each of which analyses an aspect of his work and links it to current thinking in that area. This volume forms a two-part set together with Words and Intelligence I: Selected Works by Yorick Wilks, by the same editors.
Synopsis
It has been said of the brothers Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt that between them they were the last people to have known all that there was to know, to have had a mastery of the best that contemporary science knew and to have made significant contributions, to be that rare thing Renaissance men. In a world of ever-greater specialisation, especially in academia, the ability to cross intellectual boundaries, bring together ideas beyond the confines of one s narrow discipline and yet make significant intellectual contributions has become ever rarer. In bringing together this celebration of Professor Yorick Wilks, it has been the ambition of the editors to provide the reader with a taste, an inkling of that which cannot be conveyed on the written page but only in the person of Yorick. He is a renaissance man in an age where such concepts have been forgotten. He is a bridge between a bewildering variety of contemporary research, and simultaneously a link between some of the most advanced thought in the broadly interpreted field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the long tradition of philosophy, literature, and general intellectual creativity that have fundamentally informed his academic research. This comes across in part when one considers his career, more so when one reads his writings but is most apparent in person. Modern scientists have become specialised, experts in only one specific domain."
Table of Contents
Introduction / Khurshid Ahmad, Christopher Brewster, and Mark Stevenson Mark Maybury / Yorick Alexander Wilks: A Meaningful Journey John A Barnden / Metaphor, Semantic Preferences and Context-Sensitivity Nicoletta Calzolari / Towards a new generation of Language Resources in the Semantic Web vision Robert Gaizauskas, Horacio Saggion, and Emma Barker / Information Access and Natural Language Processing: A Stimulating Dialogue Gregory Grefenstette / Three steps in Wilks work: From theory to resources to practice Patrick Hanks / Preference Syntagmatics Nancy Ide and David Woolner / Historical Ontologies Makoto Nagao / An Amorphous Object Must Be Cut By A Blunt Tool Sergei Nirenburg / Homer, the Author of The Iliad and the Computational-Linguistic Turn Nigel Shadbolt / Philosophical Engineering Harold Somers / Machine Translation and the World Wide Web Karen Spärck Jones / Semantic primitives: the tip of the iceberg John Tait and Michael Oakes / Molecules, Meaning and Post-Modernist Semantics