Bonnie Dorr facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Bonnie Dorr
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| Alma mater | Boston University MIT |
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| Institutions | University of Florida, Gainesville Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition University of Maryland, College Park |
Bonnie Jean Dorr is an American computer scientist. She helps computers understand and use human language. This field is called natural language processing. She also works on machine translation, which is how computers translate languages. Other areas she studies include automatic summarization (computers making short summaries) and explainable artificial intelligence (making sure we understand how AI works).
Bonnie Dorr is a professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville. There, she leads the Natural Language Processing Research Laboratory. Before this, she was a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. She also worked at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. She was once the president of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
Her Education Journey
Bonnie Dorr studied at Boston University. She then earned two advanced degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She got her Master's degree in 1986 and her Ph.D. in 1990. Her Ph.D. research was about how computers could translate languages.
Her Career in Science
Dorr started teaching at the University of Maryland in 1992. She helped create a special lab there for computational linguistics. This lab focused on how computers process language. She also became an associate dean, which is a leadership role, in the university's science college.
From 2011, she also worked for DARPA. This is a government agency that develops new technologies. In 2014, she joined the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.
In 2022, Bonnie Dorr moved to the University of Florida. There, she started and now directs the Natural Language Processing Research Laboratory. This lab works on exciting projects that teach computers to understand and use human language better.
Her Book on Translation
Bonnie Dorr wrote a book called Machine Translation: A View from the Lexicon in 1993. It was based on her Ph.D. work. The book explained a special way for computers to translate languages. Instead of translating directly, her method used an "intermediate form." Think of it like a universal language that computers could understand.
Her system, called UNITRAN, could translate between English, Spanish, and German. This was a new idea at the time. Today, machine translation often uses different methods. These include statistical machine translation and neural machine translation. Bonnie Dorr's newer work also focuses on making sure we can understand *why* these modern AI systems translate the way they do.
Awards and Honors
Bonnie Dorr has received many honors for her work. She was the president of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2008. She has also been recognized as a Sloan Research Fellow and a Presidential Faculty Fellow.
In 2013, she became a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. This was for her important work in helping computers understand language and for her machine translation methods. In 2016, she was also made a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics. In 2021, she became a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. These honors show how important her contributions are to computer science.
