PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Gregory Grefenstette

Gregory Grefenstette is a computer scientist who works on natural language processing and information retrieval, with research spanning automatic thesaurus building, cross-language search and the use of the Web as a text corpus. After a Stanford bachelor's degree in 1978, he completed a University of Pittsburgh PhD on automatic thesaurus generation in 1993. As a principal scientist at the Xerox Research Centre Europe from 1993 to 2001, he edited the first book on cross-language information retrieval, and in 2003 he and Adam Kilgarriff introduced a Computational Linguistics special issue on the Web as Corpus. Later roles included chief science officer of the search company Exalead from 2009 to 2013 and advanced researcher at Inria, where his taxonomy methods ranked first at SemEval 2015. Since 2017, he is chief scientific officer of Biggerpan and a senior research scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.

Timeline

  1. 1956–1983

    Stanford, Belgium and Paris-Sud

    He is born in Pittsburgh in 1956, starts at MIT as an undergraduate and earns a bachelor's degree at Stanford in 1978. He goes to Belgium as an ITT International Fellow in 1978 and receives a master's degree from Paris-Sud in 1983.

  2. 1984–1993

    Tours and a Pittsburgh PhD

    He is an assistant professor at the University of Tours from 1984 to 1989 and works in information retrieval and natural language processing from 1988. In 1993, he earns a computer science PhD at the University of Pittsburgh with the thesis "Exploring Automatic Thesaurus Generation".

  3. 1993–2001

    Principal scientist at Xerox

    He works as a principal scientist at the Xerox Research Centre Europe from 1993 to 2001, and most of his 20 US patents come from his Xerox work. In 1998, he edits Cross-Language Information Retrieval for Kluwer, the first book on the topic.

  4. 2000–2003

    The Web as a corpus

    In 2000, he and Julien Nioche present a technique for estimating the size of a language-specific corpus from the frequency of common words, and they use it to measure the growth of European languages on the Web. In September 2003, he and Adam Kilgarriff introduce a special issue of Computational Linguistics on the Web as Corpus.

  5. 2001–2008

    Clairvoyance and the CEA

    He leaves Xerox in 2001 for Clairvoyance Corporation and then works as a senior expert at the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) until 2008. In 2007, he and his research team win a three-year grant from the Lagardère Foundation for work on semantic maps.

  6. 2009–2013

    Chief science officer at Exalead

    From 2009 to 2013, he is chief science officer of the search engine company Exalead, where he manages the OSEO QUAERO CMSE program on multimedia indexing technologies. He receives the most practical system award at the 2009 ACM Multimedia Grand Challenge and a bronze award at the 2010 challenge. In 2013, he gives a keynote at eLex 2013 on generating resources for the lexicography of under-resourced languages.

  7. 2013–2017

    Personal semantics at Inria

    In November 2013, he becomes an advanced researcher at Inria, the French national research institute in computer science, where he works on personal semantics and taxonomies of personal interests. In 2015, his simple taxonomy structuring techniques, built on English Wikipedia text, rank first in task 17 of SemEval 2015.

  8. Since 2017

    Biggerpan and IHMC

    He becomes chief scientific officer of Biggerpan, a company developing a predictive contextual engine for the mobile web, in June 2017, and joins the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) as a senior research scientist in 2017. In July 2017, he co-organizes Dagstuhl Seminar 17301 on user-generated content in social media as an IHMC researcher.

  1. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI from 1961 to 2025, with a year-by-year chart.
  2. The United States employs an estimated 53% of people in our data with a known employment countryOur estimates of where AI careers are concentrated now and how countries’ shares of dated positions changed over time.
  3. 46% of living people in our data with known birth and employment countries work outside their birth countryOur estimate of cross-border careers in AI, from country of birth and the country of each current organization.
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionOur estimates of where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led, from education records in cited biographies.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. Gregory Grefenstette - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  2. User:Ggrefen - ACL Wiki aclweb.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  3. Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford: Use of Semantics in Real Life Applications cs.ox.ac.uk. Checked 19 October 2026.
  4. [cs/0006032] Estimation of English and non-English Language Use on the WWW arxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  5. Introduction to the Special Issue on the Web as Corpus - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  6. Keynote speakers - eLex 2013 elex.link. Checked 19 October 2026.
  7. [1502.01271] INRIASAC: Simple Hypernym Extraction Methods arxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  8. Gregory Grefenstette | alphaXiv alphaxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  9. Dagstuhl Seminar 17301: User-Generated Content in Social Media dagstuhl.de. Checked 19 October 2026.