18 Facts About Margaret Masterman

Margaret Masterman was a British linguist and philosopher, most known for her pioneering work in the field of computational linguistics and especially machine translation.

Margaret Masterman attended the lectures of Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge, she was one of the few selected to take notes, her notes and the notes of others were lather compiled as The Blue Book.

Margaret Masterman was a student at Newnham College, Cambridge and read modern languages and then Moral Sciences.

Margaret Masterman was ahead of her time by some twenty years: many of her beliefs and proposals for language processing by computer have now become part of the common stock of ideas in the artificial intelligence and machine translation fields.

Margaret Masterman was never able to lay adequate claim to them because they were unacceptable when she published them, and so when they were written up later by her students or independently "discovered" by others, there was no trace back to her, especially in these fields where little or nothing over ten years old is ever reread.

Margaret Masterman always argued that semantic primitives would only make sense if there were empirical criteria for their discovery and a theory that allowed for the fact that they, too, would develop exactly the polysemy of any higher or natural language; and she always emphasised the functional role of primitives in, for example, resolving sense ambiguity and as an interlingua for MT.

Margaret Masterman got from him the idea that syntactic theory was fundamentally semantic or pragmatic, in either its categories and their fundamental definition, or in terms of the role of syntax as an organizing principle for semantic information.

Margaret Masterman was the first AI researcher to be influenced by Halliday, long before Terry Winograd.

Equally, Margaret Masterman's determination in establishing and maintaining the Unit, with the enormous effort in fund raising that this involved, was very striking: the fact that it could continue for decades, and through periods when public support for such work was hard to come by, is a tribute to Margaret Masterman's persistence and charm.

Margaret Masterman had no time for those who felt that all that needed doing was syntactic parsing, or that complete parsing was necessary before you did anything else.

Serious research stopped at CLRU about 1978 and Margaret Masterman tried to restart the CLRU in 1980 with William Williams in the hope that the new breed of micro-computers could be used to develop her algorithms for natural language translation.

Margaret Masterman walked the 7 miles from Millington Road in Cambridge to Orwell and purchased two North Star Horizon computers from Intelligent Artefacts.

When Margaret Masterman died in 1986 William Williams closed down CLRU and its unique library of early MT documents were dumped into a skip, even though two university bodies had offered to give it a home.

Margaret Masterman was one of cofounders of Lucy Cavendish College and its first Vice-President.

Margaret Masterman was a great-niece of Lucy Cavendish after whom the college is named.

Margaret Masterman was a founder and the major inspiration of the Epiphany Philosophers, a group which shared some membership with the CLRU and was dedicated to the study of the relationship of science and religion and the forms of religious practice.

In 1965, Margaret Masterman read the work: "The Nature of a Paradigm" at the Fourth International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, in London.

Margaret Masterman proposed that Kuhn's critics in the philosophy of science dealt only with metaparadigms and explored the insights and implications of the various conceptions.