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FREDERICK JELINEK
1932–2010
elected in 2006
“For contributions to statistical language processing with
applications to automatic speech recognition.”
By BiiNg-HWaNg (fred) JUaNg aNd laWreNce raBiNer
f REDERICK JELINEK, an information-theoretic linguist,
died september 14, 2010, of a heart attack, at the age of 77.
Jelinek was a czech american researcher in information theory
and natural language processing. Born just before the war,
on November 18, 1932, in czechoslovakia to a Jewish father
(who was a dentist and died of disease in the Theresienstadt
concentration camp in 1945) and a catholic mother (who
converted to Judaism), fred Jelinek and his family managed
to escape being sent to the concentration camps, due to his
mother’s background, and to eventually emigrate to the United
states in the early years of the communist regime.
Jelinek studied the newly developing field of information
theory at the Massachusetts institute of Technology under
Professor robert fano. Jelinek had begun to develop an
interest in linguistics after the immigration of his wife, who
initially enrolled in the linguistics program at MiT; he often
accompanied her to linguistics classes. after his graduate
degree, he joined cornell University in anticipation of the
opportunity to work with charles f. Hockett, a prominent
linguist there. although the intended research program in
linguistics fell through, Jelinek went on to teach and develop
information theory at cornell in the subsequent years before
joining IBM Research in 1972. Jelinek’s affiliation with Cornell
was not a long one, but he deserved credit for the creation and
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216 MeMorial TriBUTes
recognized prominence of cornell’s program in information
theory.
interestingly, at iBM, Jelinek got the opportunity to pursue
research in the two fields of most interest to him—linguistics
and information theory—through the challenge of designing an
automatic typewriter that would respond to the human voice.
He saw speech recognition as an information theory problem,
rather than the traditional view that speech recognition could
(or to some, should) be solved using fundamental principles in
acoustics and/or linguistics (or more likely a combination of
the two technologies). as an admirer of claude shannon, the
“Father of Information Theory,” Jelinek’s approach followed
the fundamental teaching of the “Shannon game,” in which
a person competes with a computer, which keeps an array of
conditional probabilities that define the odds of a given word
following a specified sequence of words, in completing a
partial sentence.
information theorists believe that a machine that chooses the
most probable word to succeed the three (or more) preceding
(already seen) words would be more statistically likely than
the guess made by a human, thereby winning the game. The
machine need not actually understand or guess the meaning
the sentence really intends to express. The computer-selected
word is thus based on the so-called n-gram statistical grammar
commonly used in speech recognition systems today. With
such types of grammar as the discrete source models, Jelinek
treated the speech recognition problem, or rather the natural
language processing problem, as a noisy-channel discrete
decoding problem and advocated the method of maximum
likelihood decoding. This statistical approach to linguistics,
built on the framework of information theory, stayed in
the course of the axiomatic probability theory, avoided the
mathematically intractable problem of human intelligence,
but clashed with the conventional discipline of linguistics.
Jelinek was well known for his wry humor, most especially
this oft-quoted quip: “Every time I fire a linguist, my payroll
goes down and the performance of my speech recognizer goes
up.” Jelinek’s engineering results, as manifested in systems
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FREDERICK JELINEK
such as iBM’s Tangora, eventually won the respect of many
practically minded linguists or linguistic engineers and
earned him many distinctions, including induction into the
National academy of engineering. Jelinek can be considered
a pioneering figure in the field of information-theoretic
linguistics and its most prominent advocate.
in 1993 Jelinek retired from iBM and joined John Hopkins
University as director of the center for language and speech
Processing and Julian sinclair smith Professor of electrical
and computer engineering. soon after joining Johns Hopkins,
Jelinek started to organize the annual summer workshop on
spoken-language research, which has benefitted many young-
generation research engineers and students, even to this date.
Jelinek won numerous distinctions. He received the signal
Processing society award of the institute of electrical and
Electronics Engineers in 1997, the ESCA Medal for Scientific
achievement in 1999, the european language resource
Association’s first Antonio Zampolli Prize in 2004, the James
l. flanagan speech and audio Processing award in 2005, and
the 2009 lifetime achievement award from the association
for computational linguistics. He received a honoris causa
Ph.d. from charles University in 2001 and was inducted into
the National academy of engineering in 2006.
fred Jelinek is survived by his wife, czech screenwriter
Milena Jelinek; a daughter and son; a sister and stepsister; and
three grandchildren.
