Daniel Jurafsky is a professor of linguistics and computer science at Stanford University. He is also an author. He worked with Daniel Gildea to create the first automatic system for semantic role labeling (SRL). He wrote The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (2014) and a textbook on speech and language processing (2000). For The Language of Food, Jurafsky was named a finalist for the James Beard Award. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.

Education

Jurafsky received his B.A. in linguistics in 1983 and his Ph.D. in computer science in 1992, both from the University of California, Berkeley. He then completed a postdoctoral research position at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley from 1992 to 1995.

Academic life

He is the author of The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (W. W. Norton & Company, 2014). He also wrote a textbook with James H. Martin titled Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition (Prentice Hall, 2000).

In 2002, Daniel Gildea and Daniel Jurafsky created the first automatic system for semantic role labeling (SRL), sometimes called "shallow semantic parsing." This system helped make the FrameNet annotation process faster. Since then, SRL has become one of the standard tasks in natural language processing.

Selected works

• 2009. Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition, 2nd Edition. (with James H. Martin) Prentice-Hall. ISBN 978-0131873216
• 2014. The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0393240832
• 2026. Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition, 3rd Edition draft. (with James H. Martin)

Honors and awards

1998: NSF Career Award
2002: MacArthur Fellowship
2019: LSA Fellow
2022: Atkinson Prizes in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences