Susumu Kuno

Timeline

1. 1956–1958

   Linguistics at Tokyo University

   Born in Tokyo in 1933, he earns his A.B. at Tokyo University in 1956 and his A.M. in 1958, with a thorough grounding in linguistics under Shirō Hattori. His postgraduate research focuses on the Dravidian languages.

2. 1960–1964

   Machine translation at Harvard

   He goes to Harvard in 1960 to work on a machine translation project. In 1964 he receives his Ph.D. there with a dissertation titled Automatic Syntactic Analysis of English, advised by Anthony Oettinger.

3. 1961–1966

   Papers on parsing and translation

   In 1961, he presents “A preliminary approach to Japanese-English automatic translation” at the International Conference on Machine Translation and Applied Language Analysis. A 1963 paper, “Sentence structure diagrams,” describes a system added to the multiple-path syntactic analyzer that produces a structure diagram for each analysis of a sentence. His 1966 paper “The augmented predictive analyzer for context-free languages - its relative efficiency” appears in Communications of the ACM.

4. 1967

   President of the ACL

   In 1967, he serves as president of the Association for Computational Linguistics, following Paul Garvin in 1966 and preceding Don Walker in 1968.

5. 1973

   The Structure of the Japanese Language

   MIT Press publishes his book The Structure of the Japanese Language in 1973. Drawing on transformational grammar, it sets out when otherwise normal grammatical patterns of Japanese cannot be used.

6. 1987–1993

   Books on functional syntax

   Known for a discourse-functionalist approach to syntax called functional sentence perspective, he publishes Functional Syntax: Anaphora, Discourse, and Empathy with the University of Chicago Press in 1987. With Ken-ichi Takami, he follows it in 1993 with Grammar and Discourse Principles: Functional Syntax and GB Theory.

7. 1990–1996

   Logovista translation engine

   He proposes a commercial English–Japanese translation engine grounded in his linguistic work, and Language Engineering Corporation in Belmont, Massachusetts, builds the Logovista system under contract, with Kuno as Chief Scientist. Funding is secured in 1990, and the first commercial release appears in Japan in 1992. A 1996 US patent, number 5,528,491, names Kuno and Barton D. Wright as inventors of an automated natural language translation method.

8. As of October 2026

   Emeritus professor at Harvard

   He is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics in Harvard University's Department of Linguistics, where he received his Ph.D. in 1964 and spent his entire career.