Julie Beth Lovins

Timeline

1. 1945

   Honors degree at Pembroke College

   She is born in Washington, D.C., in October 1945 and grows up in Amherst, Massachusetts. At Pembroke College, the women's college of Brown University, she studies mathematics and linguistics and graduates with honors, writing a thesis titled A Study of Idioms.

2. 1968

   The Lovins stemmer

   In 1968, she publishes "Development of a Stemming Algorithm" in Mechanical Translation and Computational Linguistics through MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics; it is the first published stemming algorithm. Designed around subject-term keywords from materials science and engineering documents, the Lovins stemmer strips the longest matching ending from a list of 294 and then repairs the stem's spelling. It influences later work, including the Porter stemmer that Martin Porter publishes in 1980.

3. 1970–1973

   Linguistics PhD at Chicago

   She receives the Linguistic Society of America's inaugural Bloch Fellowship in 1970 to attend graduate school. At the University of Chicago, she earns an MA in 1970 and a PhD in linguistics in 1973 with a dissertation on loan phonology.

4. January 1971

   Measuring stemmer errors

   In January 1971, she publishes "Error evaluation for stemming algorithms as clustering algorithms" in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science. The paper sets out mathematical measures for errors made by stemming routines, ties split and merged word clusters to losses in recall and precision, and estimates losses of 4% in recall and 1% in relevance for the Project Intrex stemmer on one-word queries.

5. 1974

   Tsuda College and Tokyo research

   After her 1973 PhD, she spends a year as a linguist-at-large, mostly at a University of Tokyo language research institute, and as an English conversation teacher. In 1974, she becomes an assistant professor of English and linguistics at Tsuda College, on the western edge of Tokyo prefecture. As a guest researcher at the University of Tokyo's Research Institute of Logopedics and Phoniatrics, she writes a final report on a pronunciation test system for its 1974 annual bulletin.

6. By 1979

   Speech synthesis at Bell Labs

   Back in the United States, she implements early speech synthesis at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where she works with the Japanese linguist Osamu Fujimura. She moves to Mountain View, California, in 1979.

7. 1990s

   Silicon Valley software and consulting

   She engineers software at seven Silicon Valley firms and consults on computational linguistics for many more through the 1990s. Her consulting business goes by the name The Language Doctor.

8. 2017–2018

   A Mountain View council tribute

   In September 2017, the mayor's tribute in Mountain View City Council honors her civic work, which includes volunteering for the League of Women Voters and the Mountain View Friends of the Library. She dies in Mountain View in January 2018, aged 72.