Ralph Grishman
Ralph Grishman developed methods and tools for extracting facts from text. His physics studies at Columbia overlapped with work on NYU’s Linguistic String Project, led by Naomi Sager. He joined NYU’s computer science faculty in 1973 and founded the Proteus Project. His 1995 MUC-6 paper explains a shift toward local patterns for extracting information from news. In 2025, Grishman reviewed that work and credited the Proteus team. He is NYU professor emeritus. His work on language resources, parsing and evaluation helped make textual information easier to use.
- Now at
- New York University
- Works
- 375
- Citations
- 14,300
- h-index
- 53
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
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1969–1973
From physics to language
Grishman worked as a consultant to NYU’s Linguistic String Project from 1969 to 1973. He joined Naomi Sager’s effort to extract useful information from patient discharge summaries. He built a Fortran parser and helped develop rules for increasingly complex sentence structures.
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1973
A computer science career
He completed his Columbia physics doctorate in 1973 and became an assistant professor in NYU’s computer science department that year. He became associate professor in 1978 and professor in 1983. These positions supported continuing language research; he founded the Proteus Project.
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1995
Information extraction at MUC-6
In his MUC-6 paper, Grishman describes NYU’s information extraction system and the limits of full sentence parsing for the task. The system used local pattern recognition to build useful structures. The paper details names, noun groups, relations, and event processing.
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2025
Shared tools
In a 2025 retrospective, he described information extraction as converting selected entities and relationships in text into structured records. His work includes Proteus tools such as COMLEX and NOMLEX and addresses the importance of resolving references and varied expressions. Students, researchers and faculty contributed to the Proteus Project. He is NYU professor emeritus.
Sources and credits
Photo: Sleepsong, via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: commons.wikimedia.org. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.
