Gregory Grefenstette


Gregory Grefenstette is a French American computer scientist, researcher, professor, and author in the fields of artificial intelligence and natural language processing, who currently serves as chief scientific officer at Biggerpan, a company developing a predictive contextual engine for the mobile web. Grefenstette is also a senior associate researcher at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.

Biography

Grefenstette was born in Pittsburgh, PA in 1956. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an undergraduate student in mathematical science and completed his bachelor's degree at Stanford University in 1978. Grefenstette graduated with a master's degree from Paris-Sud University in 1983 and received his PhD in computer science from University of Pittsburgh in 1993. From 1984 to 1989, he has also worked as an assistant professor at University of Tours, in France.
Grefenstette's research primarily focuses on natural language processing. Following his PhD work on “Exploring Automatic Thesaurus Generation”, he mostly addressed large-scale natural language processing problems and co-edited with Adam Kilgarriff a special issue of "Computational Linguistics" about how to use the Internet as a corpus for machine learning. Previous to his position at Biggerpan, Grefenstette was an Advanced Researcher at INRIA, the French national research institute in Computer Science, working on personal semantics. Prior to that, he was chief science officer of Exalead, a search engine company, managing the OSEO QUAERO CMSE program on innovative multimedia indexing technologies. Grefenstette is also a former chief scientist at the Xerox Research Centre Europe, at Clairvoyance Corporation, and with the French CEA.
Grefenstette was named as an inventor in 20 US patents, a majority of which were filed during his years at Xerox. With his research team, he has received awards for his work on semantic maps and won a three-year grant by the Lagardere Foundation in 2007. He has also authored four books and has been part of several journal publications. Referenced in many natural language processing research papers, Grefenstette is especially renowned for his work on cross-language information retrieval and distributional semantics.

Selected works

Books