Mark J. Steedman
Also known as Mark Steedman
Mark J. Steedman researches computational linguistics, grammar and meaning. He earned his Edinburgh AI doctorate in 1973, worked at Pennsylvania from 1988 to 1998 and returned to Edinburgh as a cognitive-science professor in 1998. His work includes combinatory categorial grammar, parsing, semantics and speech intonation. His books include The Syntactic Process and Taking Scope. An AAAI Fellow from 1993 and ACL Fellow from 2012, he received ACL’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018.
- Now at
- University of Edinburgh
- Works
- 372
- Citations
- 18,918
- h-index
- 63
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
-
1973
AI and musical perception
Steedman earned an Edinburgh AI doctorate in 1973. His dissertation studied the formal description of musical perception under Christopher Longuet-Higgins. Earlier Sussex experimental-psychology study and subsequent cognition research gave his work an explicitly interdisciplinary academic setting.
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1988–1993
Language research at Pennsylvania
Steedman worked as faculty at Pennsylvania from 1988 to 1998. His work covers combinatory categorial grammar, wide-coverage parsing and semantics. AAAI elected him a Fellow in 1993. His research links the structure of sentences with computational representations of their meaning.
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1998–2012
Edinburgh, syntax and scope
Steedman returned to Edinburgh as cognitive-science professor in 1998 and led its language and cognition institute through 2010. He published The Syntactic Process in 2000 and Taking Scope in 2012. These works connect grammatical processes with the interpretation of language.
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2012–2018 and later research
Recognition and shared language work
He became an ACL Fellow in 2012 and received its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018. His later work includes language acquisition, parsing, inference and language models. He also studies meaningful intonation, gesture and tense. The work spans symbolic representations and later language-processing methods.
Sources and credits
Photo: homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk; Mark Steedman's Home Page; creator not stated. License: Not stated by source. Source: homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.