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Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University, received a 2022 Atkinson Prize in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences.
Jurafsky has made landmark contributions to computational linguistics and its application to modeling the social, interactional, and cognitive aspects of human language and its processing.
His interdisciplinary approach to fundamental research questions – forging links between the study of human language processing and machine language processing, the processing of spoken and written language, the cognitive and the social, and ranging from individual sounds to entire discourses – has pushed the boundaries of computational psycholinguistics.
His work in data-driven, probabilistic computations to understand human language processing has enabled new scientific discoveries throughout linguistics, cognitive psychology, and social psychology. His work has also helped advance the study of race and gender in computational modeling of language and its application to social justice.
As co-author of the widely used computational linguistics textbook, Speech and Language Processing, and through his creation of free online lectures and materials, Jurafsky continues to inspire and teach new generations of students.
The Atkinson Prize in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences (formerly the NAS Prize in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences) is presented to honor significant advances in the psychological and cognitive sciences with important implications for formal and systematic theory in these fields. Two prizes of $100,000 are presented biennially. The prize was established by Richard C. Atkinson in 2013.
