The artificial intelligence tools we use today, including Siri, Google Translate or ChatGPT, would not exist if pioneers such as the computer scientist Yorick Wilks had not helped to establish the field of natural language processing: teaching computers to interpret, generate and translate human language. Crucial to Wilks’s research and career progression was his experience in Stanford, California, where he worked in the lab of the AI pioneer John McCarthy in the 1970s.
Wilks, who has died aged 83, undertook work in computational linguistics, machine translation and AI more broadly. One of his achievements was the development of the preference semantics model, a technique for representing the meaning of words and phrases by considering their context and usage in natural language texts. This approach has found extensive use in automated question-answering systems such as chatbots.
