Henry Kucera
Henry Kučera, born Jindřich Kučera (15 February 1925 – 20 February 2010) was a Czech linguist who was a pioneer in corpus linguistics and linguistic software.
Kucera was born in the former Czechoslovakia in the village of Třebařov (between Pardubice and Olomouc). When the Communists came to power in 1948, his studies in philosophy and linguistics at Charles University in the Czech capital of Prague were interrupted. He was forced to leave Czechoslovakia in April of '48 when it became clear that his political writings had placed him at risk of detention by the Communist authorities.
He first travelled to occupied Germany where he worked for Czech refugee organizations assisting in relocation programs and working under the supervision of the US CIC (Counter Intelligence Corps) while preparing Czech passports for refugees. His mentor at that time was Pavel Tigrid who would be a longtime friend and who later became the minister of culture for Czechoslovakia following the Velvet Revolution in 1989.
When an opportunity to emigrate to the United States came in 1949 he chose to take the opportunity and traveled aboard the USS General C. H. Muir to New York.
After receiving his PhD from Harvard University he taught at University of Florida at Gainesville for two years. Kučera returned to Harvard in 1954 as a research fellow. The next year Assistant Professor Kucera received an appointment at Brown University where he was promoted to full professor in 1965. He spent the rest of his teaching career there and retired in 1990 with, among other honors, a black tie retirement party and the publication of a Festschrift.
He married Jacqueline Kučera (née Marie Jacqueline Fortin) (1928–2008) in 1951. The Kučeras settled in Providence, RI and Freedom, NH. They had three children, Tomaš Kučera (b. 1968), John Kučera (b.1970-d.1970), and Edward Kučera (b. 1970).
While at Brown he was able to further pursue his interest in linguistics. At Brown, he became interested in the computational analysis of human language, though at the time there were scarcely any tools for this type of research.
In 1963–1964, Kučera collaborated with W. Nelson Francis to create the Brown Corpus of Standard American English, generally known as the Brown Corpus. This was a carefully compiled selection of current American English as published during the year 1961 in 1000 sources on a wide variety of subjects. It has been very widely used in computational linguistics, and was for many years among the most-cited resources in the field. Kučera and Francis themselves subjected it to a variety of computational analyses from which derived their classic work Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English (1967), followed by Francis and Kučera's Frequency Analysis of English Usage: Lexicon and Grammar (1982).
Shortly thereafter, Boston publisher Houghton-Mifflin approached Kučera to supply a million word, three-line citation base for its new American Heritage Dictionary. This ground-breaking new dictionary, which first appeared in 1969, was the first dictionary to be compiled using corpus linguistics for word frequency and other information.
Kučera wrote one of the first spell checkers over Christmas, 1981, in PL/I for VAX machines, at the behest of Digital Equipment Corporation. It was a simple, rapid spelling verifier. Further development resulted in "International Correct Spell" a spell checking program which was used on word processing systems such as Word Star, and Microsoft Word in addition to numerous small computer applications. Kučera later oversaw the development of Houghton-Mifflin’s Correct Text grammar checker, which also drew heavily on statistical techniques for analysis. He founded Language Systems Incorporated (LSI), later Language Systems Software Incorporated (LSSI), to manage his software programs and updates until the patents expired in 2002.
In addition to his PhD in Linguistics from Harvard University, Kučera had a doctorate from Charles University in Prague which was restored after the Velvet Revolution ousted the communist rule in Czechoslovakia. He received honorary degrees from Pembroke College in Providence, RI, Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA, and Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. He was a member of the academic honor society Phi Beta Kappa.
[edit] External links
- Profile of Henry Kucera (from Language Industry Monitor).
- Partial list of publications from the DBLP Bibliography Server.
- Obituary of Henry Kučera
