Michael McCord
Also known as Michael C. McCord
Michael McCord is a natural-language researcher whose Slot Grammar work became part of IBM Watson’s question-answering technology. He published “Slot Grammars” in 1980, wrote an LMT paper in 1989, and coauthored IBM’s 1991 study of international machine-translation work built around his LMT approach. With Arendse Bernth, he designed a machine-translation confidence index; he later coauthored a statistical MT paper about automatically learned rewrite patterns and an Arabic Slot Grammar parser. AAAI named him among the IBM Watson team that received the 2013 Feigenbaum Prize, and by 2021 his former IBM manager Esmé Manandise described his language and parsing technology as central to Watson’s Jeopardy! project.
Timeline
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1980
Slot Grammars
He publishes “Slot Grammars” in the American Journal of Computational Linguistics in 1980.
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1989
Publishing LMT
In 1989, he publishes “LMT” in the Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit II.
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1991
IBM translation research
In 1991, he coauthors “Advances in Machine Translation Research in IBM,” which describes international projects following his LMT approach. The paper covers Slot Grammar enhancements, statistical translation techniques and anaphora resolution.
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2000
Translation confidence
With Arendse Bernth, he describes a machine-translation confidence index in 2000. Their paper examines source analysis and compares training by hand-tuned heuristics with linear regression analysis.
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2004
Learned rewrite patterns
With Fei Xia, he publishes “Improving a Statistical MT System with Automatically Learned Rewrite Patterns” at COLING 2004.
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2007
An Arabic parser
In 2007, he and Violetta Cavalli-Sforza publish “An Arabic Slot Grammar Parser” in the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages proceedings.
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2013
The Feigenbaum Prize
In 2013, AAAI awards the Feigenbaum Prize to the IBM Watson Team and names McCord among its members. The prize recognizes the team for demonstrating that a synthesis of AI techniques can achieve human-level performance in real-time factual question-answering.
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By 2021
Watson language technology
By 2021, former IBM colleague Esmé Manandise describes McCord as one of her managers and says his language and parsing technology formed the core of the Watson project for Jeopardy!.
Career
- 1985–2007IBMManager
- 1975–1983University of Kentucky
Most-cited works
- Improving a statistical MT system with automatically learned rewrite patterns
- Singular homology groups and homotopy groups of finite topological spaces
- Question analysis: How Watson reads a clueWith Adam Lally and Branimir Boguraev
- Classifying Spaces and Infinite Symmetric Products
- Slot Grammar: A System for Simpler Construction of Practical Natural Language Grammars
Colleagues
Sources and credits
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