17 Facts About Frederick Jelinek

Frederick Jelinek was a Czech-American researcher in information theory, automatic speech recognition, and natural language processing.

Frederick Jelinek is well known for his oft-quoted statement, "Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up".

Frederick Jelinek studied engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and taught for 10 years at Cornell University before accepting a job at IBM Research.

Frederick Jelinek's father was Jewish; his mother was born in Switzerland to Czech Catholic parents and had converted to Judaism.

Frederick Jelinek's mother hoped her son would become a physician, but Jelinek dreamed of being a lawyer.

Frederick Jelinek studied engineering in evening classes at the City College of New York and received stipends from the National Committee for a Free Europe that allowed him to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Frederick Jelinek had been in Vienna and applied for a visa, hoping to see his former acquaintances again.

Frederick Jelinek asked for help from Jerome Wiesner and Cyrus Eaton, the latter who lobbied Nikita Khrushchev.

Thanks to the lobbying, the future Milena Frederick Jelinek was one of them.

Frederick Jelinek was still working there at the time of his death; Jelinek died of a heart attack at the close of an otherwise normal workday in mid-September 2010.

Frederick Jelinek was survived by his wife, daughter and son, sister, stepsister, and three grandchildren, including Sophie Gold Jelinek.

Frederick Jelinek said that the underlying linguistic problems must be solved before attempts at NLP could be reasonably made.

Frederick Jelinek had begun to develop an interest in linguistics after the immigration of his wife, who initially enrolled in the MIT linguistics program with the help of Roman Jakobson.

Frederick Jelinek often accompanied her to Chomsky's lectures, and even discussed the possibility of changing orientation with his adviser.

Frederick Jelinek was not a pioneer of speech recognition, he was the pioneer of speech recognition.

Frederick Jelinek's works won "best paper" awards on several occasions, and he received a number of company awards while he worked at IBM.

At a 2004 presentation, Frederick Jelinek claimed that he said it in a talk titled "Applying Information Theoretic Methods: Evaluation of Grammar Quality" at the Workshop on Evaluation of NLP Systems.