Adam Kilgarriff
Adam Kilgarriff was a computational linguist whose work connected corpus analysis to word-sense disambiguation and dictionary work. He studied philosophy and engineering at Cambridge, completed a computational linguistics doctorate at Sussex, and worked at Longman Dictionaries and the University of Brighton. He organized SENSEVAL, led two ACL interest groups, helped develop the Lexicom workshop series, and co-developed Sketch Engine with Pavel Rychlý. The system combined corpus search with word sketches; Kilgarriff died in 2015.
- Works
- 217
- Citations
- 21,177
- h-index
- 45
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 15 October 2026.
Timeline
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1979–1992
A doctorate in polysemy
He earns a first-class BA in philosophy and engineering at Cambridge in 1982, an MSc in intelligent knowledge-based systems at Sussex in 1988, and a DPhil in computational linguistics at Sussex in 1992.
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1992–2004
Dictionary research in Brighton
He works as a computational linguist at Longman Dictionaries from 1992 to 1995, then holds research fellow and senior lecturer posts at the University of Brighton through 2004. In 1995, he proposes lexicographic tools for exploring the words and senses that matter within each domain.
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1998–2001
Evaluating word senses
He inaugurates and coordinates the first SENSEVAL evaluation in 1998, where teams compare word-sense disambiguation systems, and co-chairs the 2001 round.
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2000–2003
A lexicography master's course
He leads Brighton's MSc in Lexical Computing and Lexicography from 2000 to 2003; the computational lexicography programme evolves into the independent Lexicom workshop series.
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2000–2004
Leading the lexicon group
He serves as president of the ACL's SIG on the Lexicon from 2000 to 2004.
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2003–2004
Launching Sketch Engine
He founds Lexical Computing in 2003 and launches Sketch Engine with computer scientist Pavel Rychlý in 2004, combining a corpus-query system with word sketches.
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2006–2008
Leading Web as Corpus
He serves as president of the ACL's SIG on Web as Corpus from 2006 to 2008.
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2015
Death in 2015
He dies in 2015.
Sources and credits
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