Martin Kay, pioneering computational linguist, has died

He was brought to this country (USA) from England by my teacher and colleague, the late David Hays. Hays was leading the RAND Corporation's effort on machine translation and he hired Kay, I believe, as a programmer (among other things). I never met Kay, but I worked with him indirectly in the 1970s when I was preparing bibliography for the American Journal of Computational Linguistics (now simply Computational Linguistics). He was working at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center at the time and so had access to their laser printers. Hays and I would prepare copy on Hays's IBM Selectric typewriter and Kay would have it keyed into an Alto and printed on a laser printer. 

 

Here's a brief notice via the Association for Computational Linguistics:

Vale Martin Kay

August 22, 2021 | BY webmaster

It is with a profound sense of loss that, on behalf of the ACL Exec, I announce the passing of Martin Kay on August 7, 2021.

Martin was a pioneer and visionary of computational linguistics, in the truest sense of those terms. He made seminal contributions to the field in areas including parsing, unification grammars, finite state methods, and machine translation.

Martin was educated at the University of Cambridge, before moving to the USA and working at Rand Corporation from 1961 to 1972. He was Chair of the Department of Computer Science at University of California Irvine from 1972 to 1974, before moving to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). In 1985, he took up a position as Professor at Stanford University, and split his time between Xerox PARC and Stanford until 2002.

Martin was awarded the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005, and was Chair of the International Committee for Computational Linguistics from 1984 to 2016. But perhaps equally for those who had the good fortune of knowing him personally or attending an event that he spoke at, he was a warm, generous, extraordinarily funny, disarmingly down-to-earth man whose loss is felt keenly.

Tim Baldwin

Kay was given a life-time achievement award by the ACL in 2005. He recounts his career in an address he delivered on the occasion, A Life of Language (PDF).