Wendy Lehnert

Wendy Grace Lehnert is an American computer scientist specializing in natural language processing and known for her pioneering use of machine learning in natural language processing.[1] She is a professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.[2]

Education and career

Lehnert earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Portland State University in 1972, and a master's degree from Yeshiva University in 1974.[2] She became a student of Roger Schank at Yale University, completing her Ph.D. there in 1977 with a dissertation on The Process of Question Answering,[3] and was hired by Yale as an assistant professor. She moved to the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1982.[2] At Amherst, her doctoral students have included Claire Cardie and Ellen Riloff.[3] She retired in 2011.[1]

Books

Lehnert has written both scholarly and popular books on computing, including:

• The Process of Question Answering: A Computer Simulation of Cognition (L. Erlbaum Associates, 1978)[4]
• Light on the Web: Essentials to Make the 'Net Work for You (Addison-Wesley, 1981)
• Strategies for Natural Language Processing (with Martin Ringle, L. Erlbaum Associates, 1982)
• The Web Wizard's Guide to Freeware and Shareware (Addison-Wesley, 1982)
• Internet 101: A Beginner's Guide to the Internet and the World Wide Web (Addison-Wesley, 1998)
• The Web Wizard's Guide to HTML (Addison-Wesley, 2001)
• Web 101: Making the Net Work for You (with Richard Kopec, Addison-Wesley; 3rd ed., 2007)

Recognition

In 1991, Lehnert was elected as an AAAI Fellow.[5]

References

1. Wendy Lehnert retires, University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences, December 14, 2011, retrieved 2019-12-11
2. Wendy G. Lehnert, University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences, 20 February 2008, retrieved 2019-12-11
3. Wendy Lehnert at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
4. Miller, Lance A. (1979), "Review of The Process of Question Answering" (PDF), Contemporary Psychology, 24 (10): 777–779, doi:10.1037/017603
5. AAAI Fellows list, retrieved 2019-12-11

External links

• Home page