David G. Hays

David G. Hays

David Glenn Hays (November 17, 1928 – July 26, 1995) was a linguist, computer scientist and social scientist best known for his early work in machine translation and computational linguistics.

Contents

Career overview

David Hays graduated from Harvard College in 1951 and received his Ph. D. in 1956 from Harvard's Department of Social Relations. In 1954-1955 he held a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and took a job at the RAND Corporation, Santa Monica in 1955, where he remained though 1968. In 1969 he joined the faculty of the State University of New York at Buffalo where he was founding chairman of the newly formed linguistics department and Professor of Linguistics, of Computer Science, and of Information and Library Studies. He remained at Buffalo until 1980 when he retired from the university and moved to New York City where he worked as a private consultant and pursued independent research in cultural evolution and the arts, especially the ballet. He was on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems and starting in 1989 was a member of Connected Education's online faculty for their MA in Media Studies offered through The New School.

Language and computation

During his years at RAND he worked on the machine translation of Russian technical literature into English and more generally on computational linguistics, a term that he created. The syntactic component of the RAND system was based on Lucien Tesnière's dependency grammar and Hays become its principal advocate in America. More than anyone else Hays is responsible for the realization that language processing should consist in the application of theoretically motivated grammars to specific texts by general algorithms. In 1967 Hays published the first textbook in computational linguistics, Introduction to Computational Linguistics. At his direction RAND assembled an annotated corpus of a million words of Russian text, and thus pioneered in what is now known as corpus linguistics.

Culture and cognition

After leaving RAND and assuming his position at Buffalo, Hays turned to more a more general interest in language and cognition and, ultimately, the evolution of human culture. He developed an approach to abstract concepts in which their meaning was grounded in stories. Hays elaborated this idea in a series of articles and several of his graduate students, including Brian Phillips, Mary White, and William Benzon, employed the idea in their work. In 1982 he published Cognitive Structures, in which he developed a novel scheme for grounding cognition in perception and action as conceived in the control theory of William T. Powers. Working with William Benzon, he published a neural interpretation of this theory in 1988. During the 1980s and early 1990s he and Benzon developed a theory of cultural rank which they published in a series of papers (together and individually) and a book on the history of technology (Hays alone) in the early 1990s. His last major work was a critical review and synthesis of the empirical work that anthropologists and archaeologists had done on cultural complexity. This book was published posthumously as The Measurement of Cultural Evolution in the Non-Literate World: Homage to Raoul Naroll. At the time of his death, he had embarked on a study of the ballet, looking to understand how motion generates emotion.

Professional service

Hays played an important role in the professional organization of computational linguistics. He advocated the organization of the Association for Computational Linguistics and served as its second president in 1964. He was the first editor of its journal, Computational Linguistics (then called the American Journal of Computational Linguistics) from 1974 to 1978; the journal was originally published on microfiche to facilitate rapid publication and allow for longer articles than is practical in hard-copy publication. He was one of the founders of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics, served as its Chairman from 1965 to 1969 and was an Honorary Member from 1965 to 1995.

Selected publications

Books

Introduction to Computational Linguistics, American Elsevier, New York, 1967 B00005W7K5

Cognitive Structures, HRAF Press, New Haven, 1982 9991740309

The Evolution of Technology, Preliminary Edition. Diskette-book, Connected Editions, New York, 1991, available online.

The Measurement of Cultural Evolution in the Non-Literate World: Homage to Raoul Naroll. Metagram Press, New York, 1994 0966725506

Articles

(With Robert R. Bush) A study of group action. American Sociological Review, 19:693-701, 1954. Reprinted in Readings in Mathematical Psychology, edited by R. Duncan Luce, Robert R. Bush, and Eugene Galanter. Wiley, 1965, 2:242-253

Order of subject and object in scientific Russian when other differentia are lacking. Mechanical Translation, 5:111-113, 1958

Dependency theory: A formalism and some observations. Language, 40: 511-525, 1964. Reprinted in Syntactic Theory 1, Structuralist, edited by Fred W. Householder. Penguin, 1972

A billion books for education in America and the world: A proposal ([Rand Corporation] Memorandum RM-5574-RC) (Unknown Binding) 1968 B0006C8SVK

(With Enid Margolis, Raoul Naroll, and Revere Dale Perkins) Color term salience. American Anthropologist, 74:1107-1121, 1972

Cognitive networks and abstract terminology. Journal of Clinical Computing, 3(2):110-118, 1973

On 'alienation': An essay in the psycholinguistics of science. In Theories of Alienation, edited by R. Felix Geyer and David R. Schweitzer. Martinus Nijhoff, 1976, 169-187

Machine translation and abstract terminology. In Studies in Descriptive and Historical Linguistics, edited by Paul J. Hopper. John Benjamins, 1977, 95-108

(With David Bloom) Designation in English. In Anaphora in Discourse, edited by John V. Hinds. Champaign, Ill., Linguistic Research 1978: 1-68

(With William L. Benzon) Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence. Journal of Social and Biological Structures 11:1-30, 1988

(With William L. Benzon) The Evolution of Cognition. Journal of Social and Biological Structures 13:297-320, 1990

The Evolution of Expressive Culture. Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems 15: 187-215, 1992

Relativism and Progress. Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems 18:9-32, 1995

References

Hutchins, John, Machine Translation: past, present, future, (Ellis Horwood Series in Computers and their Applications) Chichester (UK): Ellis Horwood, 1986. (ISBN 0-85312-788-3) New York: Halsted Press, 1986. (ISBN 0-470-20313-7)

Kay, Martin, David G. Hays, in John Hutchins, ed. Early Years in Machine Translation: Memoirs and Biographies of Pioneers, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2000, pp. 165–170.

Saxon, Wolfgang, David G. Hays, 66, a Developer of Language Study by Computer, New York Times, July 28, 1995, Obituary, Section A, p. 20.


Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.

Игры ⚽ Поможем написать реферат

Look at other dictionaries:

  • David Hayes — is the name of: David Hayes (sculptor) (born 1931), American sculptor David J. Hayes (born 1953), U.S. Deputy Secretary of the Interior David A. Hayes (born 1962), Australian Thoroughbred racehorse trainer David Hayes (author), Canadian writer… …   Wikipedia

  • David Hays — For those of a similar name, see David Hayes (disambiguation). David Leslie Hays (born Finchley, Middlesex 5 November 1944) was an English born Scottish cricketer. David Hays was educated at Highgate and the University of Cambridge. He… …   Wikipedia

  • David McMurtrie Gregg — General David McMurtrie Gregg Born April 10, 1833(183 …   Wikipedia

  • David W. Carter High School — Location 1819 W. Wheatland Road Dallas, TX 75232  United States Information Type …   Wikipedia

  • David Lang (Civil War) — David Lang Born May 9, 1838(1838 05 09) Camden County, Georgia …   Wikipedia

  • David Hampton Pryor — David Pryor David Hampton Pryor (* 29. August 1934 in Camden, Arkansas) ist ein US amerikanischer Politiker (Demokratische Partei). Er war zwischen 1975 und 1979 Gouverneur von Arkansas und vertrat diesen Bundesstaat …   Deutsch Wikipedia

  • HAYS — HAYS, family established in the New World in the first quarter of the 18th century, when MICHAEL HAYS (d. 1740) emigrated from Holland to New York. Michael s sons JACOB (d. 1760), SOLOMON, ISAAC (d. 1765), and JUDAH (1703–1764) and their… …   Encyclopedia of Judaism

  • David E. Jackson — David Edward Jackson (* ca. 1785 1790; †  24. Dezember 1837 in Paris, Tennessee) war ein US amerikanischer Trapper und Pelzhändler. Er war von 1826 bis 1830 Gesellschafter des Pelzhandelsunternehmens Smith, Jackson Sublette, der späteren… …   Deutsch Wikipedia

  • Hays, Alberta — Hays is a hamlet in southern Alberta, Canada, located between the Bow River and the Oldman River, at the South Saskatchewan River forks.It was founded by David Hayes. Currently the town has a population of under 100 people living in the actual… …   Wikipedia

  • David Leisure — (* 16. November 1950 in San Diego, Kalifornien), eigentlich David Russell Leisure ist ein US amerikanischer Schauspieler. Leben Leisure studierte Kunst an der San Diego State University und teilte sich in dieser Zeit das Zimmer mit Robert Hays.… …   Deutsch Wikipedia

Share the article and excerpts

Direct link
Do a right-click on the link above
and select “Copy Link”