PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Jane J. Robinson

Also known as Jane Johnson

Jane J. Robinson was a computational linguist whose work connected machine translation, grammar research, and speech-understanding and dialogue systems. She earned a history Ph.D. at UCLA in 1946, moved from English teaching to machine-translation work at RAND, then studied correspondences between dependency and phrase-structure grammars at IBM. At SRI, she contributed grammars for speech understanding and dialogue and was part of the PATR group; she coauthored DIALOGIC and served as ACL president in 1982. She retired in 1987 and died in 2015.

Badges

Timeline

  1. Late 1950s

    From UCLA history to RAND

    Born near Dallas–Fort Worth in 1918, she earns a history BA at UCLA in 1938 and a Ph.D. there in 1946, with a dissertation on John Lilburne. After teaching English at UCLA and California State College, Los Angeles, she becomes a consultant to Dave Hays's RAND group working on machine translation in the late 1950s.

  2. 1965

    Endocentric parsing at COLING

    Her 1965 COLING paper “Endocentric Constructions and the Cocke Parsing Logic” connects endocentric constructions with parsing strategies.

  3. 1966–1967

    Grammar mapping at IBM

    In 1966, she joins the Automata Theory and Computability Group at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights. Her 1967 COLING paper, “Methods for Obtaining Corresponding Phrase Structure and Dependency Grammars,” draws correspondences between the two grammar traditions.

  4. 1970

    Case grammar through dependencies

    In her 1970 paper “Case, category and configuration,” she formally interprets Fillmore’s case grammar through dependency structures.

  5. 1973–1987

    Speech research at SRI

    Don Walker recruits her to the speech group at SRI’s AI Center in 1973. She contributes grammars for speech-understanding systems and dialogue and is part of the PATR group, whose 1984 report describes PATR-II, a grammar formalism based on unification of directed-graph structures. She retires from SRI in 1987 after 14 years there.

  6. 1979

    Discourse: Codes and Clues

    Her 1979 paper “Discourse: Codes and Clues in Contexts” appears at the 17th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

  7. 1982

    DIALOGIC and ACL presidency

    She coauthors the 1982 COLING paper “DIALOGIC: A Core Natural-Language Processing System” and serves as ACL president.

  8. 2015

    Death in 2015

    She dies in 2015.

Career

  1. 1973–1987SRI International
  2. RAND CorporationConsultant
  3. University of California, Los AngelesEnglish teacher
  4. California State University Los AngelesEnglish teacher

Education

  1. 1946University of California, Los AngelesPh.D. in History

From the biography.

  1. Direct Form 990 pay in the latest returns of 39 nonprofits with AI people on this site is highest at $2.1M at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) (2024)Includes SRI International. IRS Form 990 compensation across 39 nonprofits with AI people on this site from 2012 to 2025: in the latest returns, Mozilla reports $6.1M including related-company pay (2024) and the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) leads direct nonprofit pay at $2.1M (2024).
  2. 23% of people shaping AI who left a university for a company later returned to a universityIncludes IBM. We estimate that 468 of the 2,011 people shaping AI who left a university for a company (23%) later returned to a university after a median of 5 years, and 163 of 829 (20%) made the reverse round trip.
  3. Google alumni have founded or led 133 other organizations, more than any other AI labIncludes IBM. We estimate that alumni of 17 major AI labs went on to found or lead 350 other organizations, including 226 they founded, and we trace 472 career moves directly between 23 labs since 2010.
  4. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes University of California, Los Angeles. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. Jane J. Robinson - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. In Memoriam: Jane J. Robinson aclweb.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Jane J. Robinson | Arnold Zwicky's Blog arnoldzwicky.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Notes From The Unification Underground: A Compilation Of Papers On Unification-Based Grammar Formalisms sri.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Discourse: Codes and Clues in Contexts - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. DIALOGIC: A Core Natural-Language Processing System - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.