Lauri Karttunen

Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)

Lauri Karttunen is a Research Fellow at the Palo Alto Research Center and a Consulting Professor at Stanford University. He received his PhD in Linguistics from Indiana University in 1969. He is known for his seminal contributions to the semantics of discourse referents, implicatives, presuppositions and questions in the 1970s and 80s. In the area of computational linguistics, Karttunen was one of the first to realize and exploit the potential of finite-state transducers for linguistic applications such as morphological analysis. His early work on the logic of complementation has turned out to be fundamental for computing local textual inferences of complex sentences, the topic of his current interest. In 2007, Dr. Karttunen received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics).