#Linguist group free

#Linguist group free

He studied engineering in evening classes at the City College of New York and received stipends from the National Committee for a Free Europe that allowed him to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His mother hoped her son would become a physician, but Jelinek dreamed of being a lawyer.

His mother, anxious that her son should get a good education, made great efforts for their emigration, especially when it became clear he would not be allowed to even attempt the graduation examination. Īfter the war, Jelinek entered in the gymnasium, despite having missed several years of schooling because education of Jewish children had been forbidden since 1942. Talking about his life in a 2001 speech. But my career is the result of political circumstances, academic possibilities, and lucky accidents. I myself wanted to be a lawyer, defender of the unjustly accused. My mother wished for me to become a physician, just like my father. I somehow slid into my scientific profession. It is generally believed that scientific talent reveals itself in early youth. The family was forced to move to Prague in 1941, but Frederick, his sister and mother-thanks to the latter's background-escaped the concentration camps. However, Vilém decided to stay at the last minute and was eventually sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where he died in 1945. The couple planned to send their son to an English private school. Jelínek senior, a dentist, had planned early to escape Nazi occupation and flee to England he arranged for a passport, visa, and the shipping of his dentistry materials. His father was Jewish his mother was born in Switzerland to Czech Catholic parents and had converted to Judaism. Jelinek was born on November 18, 1932, as Bedřich Jelínek in Kladno to Vilém and Trude Jelínek. After IBM, he went to head the Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University for 17 years, where he was still working on the day he died. At IBM, his team advanced approaches to computer speech recognition and machine translation. In 1961, he married Czech screenwriter Milena Jelinek. He studied engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and taught for 10 years at Cornell University before accepting a job at IBM Research.

Jelinek was born in Czechoslovakia before World War II and emigrated with his family to the United States in the early years of the communist regime. He is well known for his oft-quoted statement, 'Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up'. Information theory, natural language processingĬornell University, IBM Research, Johns Hopkins Universityįrederick Jelinek (18 November 1932 – 14 September 2010) was a Czech-American researcher in information theory, automatic speech recognition, and natural language processing. Advancement of natural language processing techniques