Dedication
The authors dedicate this book with gratitude to Yorick Wilks, Fellow of the British Computing Society and Professor Emeritus in the Natural Language Processing Group at University of Sheffield, Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, Senior Research Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, and an extraordinary person.
Yorick mentored Ted Dunning as Department Chair and his graduate advisor during Ted’s doctoral studies in Computing Science at the University of Sheffield. He also provided guidance as Ted’s supervisor while Yorick was Director of the Computing Research Laboratory, New Mexico State University, where Ted did research on statistical methods for natural language processing (NLP). Yorick’s strong leadership showed that critical and open examination of a wide range of ideas is the foundation of real progress. Ted can only hope to try to live up to that ideal.
We both are grateful to Yorick for his outstanding and continuing contributions to computing science, especially in the fields of artificial intelligence and NLP, through a career that spans five decades. His brilliance in research is matched by a sparkling wit, and it is both a pleasure and an inspiration to know him.
These links provide more details about Yorick’s work:
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