During its 56th annual meeting in Melbourne, Australia (July 15 – July 20, 2018), the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) awarded its 2018 ACL Lifetime Achievement Award to Professor Mark Steedman.
Mark Steedman is Professor of Cognitive Science in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. He has made outstanding contributions to Computational Linguistics in particular in the areas of syntax and semantics. He is the main developer of Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG), a mildly context-sensitive grammar formalism that links semantic composition to syntactic derivation in the closest possible relation. Through the development of efficient and accurate broad-coverage parsers, CCG has become one of the most influential grammar formalisms in the field. In semantics, Steedman’s work is unique in spanning both logic-based formal semantics and distributional semantics, as well as their intersection. In recent years, he has applied CCG and distributional semantics to robust question-answering and textual entailment. In addition to his work in Computational Linguistics, he has worked on analysis of music by humans and machines.
Professor Steedman is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the British Academy, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the Cognitive Science Society, and a Member of the European Academy. He was President of the ACL in 2007.
