Citizenship US Fields Computational linguistics Education University of Chicago | Name Julie Lovins Alma mater University of Chicago | |
Known for Computational linguistics | ||
Julie Beth Lovins is a computational linguist who wrote the first stemming algorithm for word matching.
It is a single pass, context sensitive stemmer, which removes endings based on the longest-match principle. The stemmer was the first to be published and was extremely well developed considering the date of its release and has been the main influence on a large amount of the future work in the area. -Adam G., et al
Biography
Lovins attended Brown University for her undergraduate degree. She received the inaugural Bloch Fellowship in 1970 from the Linguistic Society of America to attend graduate school. Lovins obtained her MA in 1970 and PhD in 1973 from the University of Chicago. Following her PhD, she spent a year working as a linguist-at-large at a University of Tokyo language research institute and as an English conversation teacher. She then joined the faculty at Tsuda College as a professor of English and linguistics, where she taught for seven years. She published an article about her work developing the first stemming algorithm through the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. A revision of her thesis on loanwords and the phonological structure of Japanese was published in 1975 by the Indiana University Linguistics Club. She moved to Mountain View, California in 1979, and later to Old Mountain View in 1981 with her partner and later husband Greg Fowler.