Madeleine Bates facts for kids
Madeleine Ashcraft Bates is a clever researcher who helped teach computers to understand and use human language. She worked at a company called BBN Technologies in Massachusetts for many years, starting in the early 1970s. She was also the president of a big group called the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1985. This group is for people who work on making computers better at understanding language.
Learning and Working
Madeleine Bates first went to Allegheny College. Then she moved to Carnegie Mellon University, where she studied mathematics and finished her degree in 1968. She continued her studies at Harvard University, earning her Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 1975. While at Harvard, she worked with a person named Bill Woods on something called augmented transition networks. This is a special way for computers to break down sentences and understand what they mean.
While she was still a student at Harvard, Madeleine started working part-time at BBN Technologies in 1971. After getting her Ph.D., she taught as a professor at Boston University for three years. Then, she became a full-time researcher at BBN, where she continued her important work on natural language processing. This field is all about making computers understand and use human languages, just like we do.
Her Family and Helping Others
Madeleine Bates married a chemist named Alan Hunt Bates in 1968. He later became a professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Madeleine's mother had a serious illness called Huntington's disease. Because of this, Madeleine became very active in helping others who had the same illness. She was even the president of a group in Massachusetts that worked to fight Huntington's disease. She has spent time helping people and raising awareness about this condition.
