New Professor of General Linguistics

Dr Stephen Pulman (BA London, MA, Ph.D. Essex), Reader in Computational Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, has been appointed as Professor of General Linguistics. Dr Pulman will be a Fellow of Somerville College when he takes up his appointment on 1 October 2000, following the resignation of Professor James Higginbotham. Dr Pulman (pictured left) was an undergraduate at Bedford College, University of London, where he took a BA Honours Degree in English (1969–72). He spent the academic year 1972–3 teaching English in Algeria, then returned to the UK to undertake an MA in Theoretical Linguistics at the University of Essex, followed by a Ph.D. in Linguistics (1974–7) and an appointment to a Lectureship in the Department of Language and Linguistics (1977). Dr Pulman left the University of Essex to take up a position as a Lecturer at the School of English and American Studies at the University of East Anglia (1978–84), then joined the University of Cambridge as a Lecturer in the Computer Laboratory. He served as Director of of the SRI International Cambridge Computer Science Research Centre from 1988–97, becoming Principal Scientist at the Centre in 1998. He became Deputy Head of the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in 1999. Dr Pulman is author of Word Meaning and Belief (London: Croom Helm Ltd. 1983), co-author of Computational Morphology: Practical Mechanisms for the English Lexicon (MIT Press, 1992), and has written numerous chapters and journal papers. He has served as a member of the editorial boards of Linguistics (1994–8) and Computational Linguistics (1994–6), and is currently a member of the Executive Committee of Association for Computational Linguistics and a member of the Linguistics Panel for the HEFCE Research Assessment Exercise, 1996 and 2001. Dr Pulman was Visiting Professor of Theoretical Computational Linguistics at the Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung, Stuttgart, in 1993, and Visiting Professor at the Copenhagen Business School, 1998–9. He has lectured widely both in the UK and on the Continent.