Robert Frederking

Timeline

1. 1986–1988

   A CMU doctorate on dialogue

   He completes his PhD dissertation, Natural Language Dialogue in an Integrated Computational Model, at Carnegie Mellon in December 1986, as a student of Jaime Carbonell. Kluwer publishes the book version, Integrated Natural Language Dialogue: A Computational Model, in 1988.

2. 1994–1996

   Co-PI on Pangloss

   He is a co-principal investigator on the Pangloss machine translation project until September 1996. In 1994, he is first author of the AMTA paper Integrating Translations from Multiple Sources within the PANGLOSS Mark III Machine Translation System, and in 1996 he and Ralf Brown co-author The Pangloss-Lite machine translation system.

3. 1997

   Best paper at IJCAI-97

   He works on translingual information retrieval, which retrieves documents in languages the searcher cannot read from English queries. In 1997, he and his colleagues present a best-paper award paper at IJCAI-97 in Nagoya, Japan.

4. By 1999

   Co-PI on DIPLOMAT

   Until 1999, he is co-principal investigator on DIPLOMAT, a pilot project to develop techniques for rapid-deployment machine translation. The first test case is Serbo-Croatian.

5. 2001–2002

   Tongues for Army chaplains

   He runs the Carnegie Mellon part of Tongues, a small-footprint speech-to-speech translation device developed with Lockheed Martin for U.S. Army chaplains, and the BBC World Service carries a radio story on the project. The first version translates between English and Croatian, and the team's Arabic work leads to a real-time demonstration for the U.S. Army in 2001. In 2002, he is first author of Field Testing the Tongues Speech-to-Speech Machine Translation System at LREC.

6. 2002

   Honored for Diplomat and Tongues

   The School of Computer Science honors him, Ralf Brown, Alexander Rudnicky and Alan Black at its 2002 awards ceremony for their work on the Diplomat and Tongues projects, which quickly develop translation systems between two languages.

7. 2004–2008

   Vice-President of AMTA

   He serves as Vice-President of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas for the 2004–2006 and 2006–2008 terms. Term limits keep him from running again in 2008.

8. As of October 2026

   Associate dean for PhD programs

   In 2015, as the School of Computer Science splits its graduate education dean post in two, he becomes Associate Dean for Doctoral Programs. He moves to half-time in January 2023 and keeps running the graduate programs. He is Associate Dean for PhD Programs in the School of Computer Science and Chair of the Master of Language Technologies program at the Language Technologies Institute.