Lauri Karttunen
American linguist
Lauri Juhani Karttunen (September 29, 1941 – March 20, 2022) was an American linguist and adjunct professor in linguistics at Stanford and an ACL Fellow.
Early life and career
Born in Finland, Karttunen studied the Finnish language at the University of Helsinki from 1960 to 1964. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1969 from Indiana University in Bloomington. At the University of Texas at Austin in the 1970s he worked mostly on semantics. He published a series of seminal papers on discourse referents, presuppositions, implicative verbs, conventional implicatures, and questions. In the 1980s Karttunen became, along with Ronald M. Kaplan, Martin Kay, and Kimmo Koskenniemi, one of the pioneers in computational linguistics on the application of finite-state transducers to phonology and morphology. Karttunen and Kenneth R. Beesley published a textbook on Finite State Morphology and a set of applications for creating morphological analyzers. Commercial versions of the finite-state technology developed by Karttunen and his colleagues at PARC and XRCE have been licensed by Xerox to many companies including SAP and Microsoft. Karttunen retired from PARC in 2011. He worked on Language and Natural Reasoning at CSLI.
Honors
The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) gives each year at its Annual Meeting a "Lifetime Achievement Award." At the age of 66, Karttunen became so far the youngest recipient of the award at the 45th Meeting in Prague in 2007.
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