Obituary: Martin Kay

Abstract

It is with great sadness that we report the passing of Martin Kay in August 2021. Martin was a pioneer and intellectual trailblazer in computational linguistics. He was also a close friend and colleague of many years. Martin was a polyglot undergraduate student of modern and medieval languages at Cambridge University, with a particular interest in translation. He was not (yet) a mathematician or engineer, but idle speculation in 1958 about the possibilities of automating the translation process led him to Margaret Masterman at the Cambridge Language Research Unit, and a shift to a long and productive career. In 1960 he was offered an internship with Dave Hays and the Linguistics Project at The RAND Corporation in California, another early center of research in our emerging discipline. He stayed at RAND for more than a decade, working on basic technologies that are needed for machine processing of natural language. Among his contributions during that period was the development of the first so-called chart parser (Kay 1967), a computationally effective mechanism for dealing systematically with linguistic dependencies that cannot be expressed in context-free grammars. The chart architecture could be deployed for language generation as well as parsing, an important property for Martin’s continuing interest in translation. It was during the years at RAND that Martin found his second calling, as a teacher of computational linguistics, initially at UCLA and then in many other settings. He was a gifted and entertaining speaker and lecturer, able to present complex material with clarity and precision. He took great pleasure in the interactions with his students and the role that he played in helping to advance their careers. He left RAND in 1972 to become a full-time professor and chair of the Computer Science Department at the University of California at Irvine. His time at Irvine was short-lived, as he was attracted back to an open-ended research environment. In 1974 he joined with Danny Bobrow, Ron Kaplan, and Terry Winograd to form the Language Understander project at the recently created Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) of the Xerox Corporation. The group took as a first goal the construction of a mixed-initiative dialog system using state-of-the-art components for knowledge representation and reasoning, language understanding, language production, and dialog management (Bobrow et al. 1977). Martin took responsibility for