Brief Biography (from cs.princeton.edu):
“Dr. Christiane Fellbaum is a senior research scholar in the Computer Science Department of Princeton University. A native of Brunswick, Germany, she received her Ph.D. in linguistics from Princeton in 1980 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Paris, she returning to Princeton as a research scientist in 1987. She is the co-developer and current director of the WordNet project, and the co-founder and co-president of the Global WordNet Association. Her honors include the Wolfgang Paul-Prize of the German Humboldt Foundation (2001) and the Antonio Zampolli Prize (2006). Her research interests include theoretical linguistics, computational and corpus linguistics, and natural language processing.”
1. Dr. Fellbaum, you've founded Princeton WordNet, an expansive tool for comp ling and NLP scholars. How did you first decide to begin WordNet, and how did you get this immense project underway? How did you overcome obstacles (or what do you foresee, like with your upcoming paper)?
WordNet was intended as a model of how humans store and access words and the knowledge about the concepts the words represent in their minds, so a model of the mental lexicon that was inspired by current theories in AI. We just wanted to explore this a bit and had no large-scale or long-term plans. Then one day I went to a conference where I found out—to my great surprise—that many computational linguists were using WordNet (we had made it available for download but never checked the number of downloads). Only then did we realize WordNet’s potential for NLP. A second surprise—a few years later—was the people were building WordNets in many other languages. And that led to the creation and interconnection (via Princeton WordNet) of many new wordnets.
2. So in relation to WordNet, you've co-founded the Global WordNet Association. How has your experience been connecting wordnets and scholars of such diverse languages? How do you hope GWA to grow in the future?
It’s great fun to learn from my international colleagues about their lexicons and the challenges they face when building a wordnet. For example: how to encode classifiers/counters, like in Chinese and Japanese? How to deal with languages like Hebrew and Arabic that have roots, which aren’t words, but are important to link semantically similar words. And what about Slavic verbs, which have two forms, depending on “aspect” (whether an action is completed or not)?
Right now, I’m working with some deaf colleague linking WordNet to SignSchool, a database of videos with American Sign Language signs. It’s very challenging!
3. I feel like linguistics has recently gained attention in relation to AI. How did you discover linguistics & decide you wanted to pursue it?
I actually got my PhD in linguistics, and I discovered psycholinguistics and computer science later. I think that language is the most interesting, most complex aspect of human behavior and modeling it computationally is challenging. Much of language is patterned and regular, but there is so much that humans process effortlessly but that machines cannot do well (yet)—such as deception detection.
4. You work with young linguists, even NACLO middle-schoolers, so how do you think the Linguistics field will evolve? What would you say to encourage a teen to study linguistics?
Oh definitely! We all have language and most of us never realize all the amazing things we do with it. Everyone should at least take one linguistics course to understand their own linguistic behavior. As to the future: I hope that linguistics an computer science will move more closely together and that more collaboration will happen.
5. What has been your favorite topic to research and why?
I have no favorite, and I have explored a number of different topics. Just anything with language and the challenges it poses to fully understand how it works.
6. Fun Facts! What are all the languages you've learned / done research on, and what are a few favorite words/idioms (you're writing a paper on idioms, I believe!)?
Growing up in Europe, I had to study three foreign languages (English, French, Russian). I added Spanish, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and Japanese later on. Whenever I go on a trip, I try to learn a bit of the language, so I dipped into Korean, Turkish, Persian, Portuguese. Of course I don’t remember all these languages!
Idioms: I find these endlessly fascinating and fun. My favorites are those that do not have a plausible meaning (plausible: “throw in the towel, pull strings”). So implausible idioms that I love include “fry your brains, lend an ear, lose one’s head”. Just imagining these makes me chuckle. I get an urge to draw them.
Editor’s Note: I met Dr. Fellbaum through participating in the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad, which she runs at Princeton University for middle and high schoolers dabbling in linguistics. Without her efforts, I never would have discovered my passion for language and linguistics, so I am grateful for the opportunities she has provided me. :)
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