Ronald Kaplan

Ronald M. Kaplan (born 1946) is an American computational linguist and research executive who has served as vice president and chief scientist for Amazon Search, earlier as vice president and distinguished scientist at Nuance Communications, and before that at Powerset within Microsoft Bing. He is an adjunct professor of linguistics at Stanford University and a principal of its Center for the Study of Language and Information. He studied mathematics and language behavior at Berkeley and took his doctorate in social psychology at Harvard, where he wrote the grammar for the LUNAR system, the first large-scale augmented transition network grammar of English. With Joan Bresnan he designed Lexical Functional Grammar, and with Martin Kay he developed the finite-state models of phonology and morphology that underlie much language technology. He holds 36 patents and received the 2019 Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award.