Adam Kilgarriff (12 February 1960 – 16 May 2015) was a corpus linguist, lexicographer and co-author of Sketch Engine.

Quotes

• ...I examined the concept, 'word sense'. It was not found to be sufficiently well-defined to be a workable basic unit of meaning.
  • in I don't believe in word senses (1997), p. 25

• It leaves me wanting to rejoice – isn’t language wonderful, that we can do all these different things with it!
  • in 'Odd one out' on his blog (31 January 2015)

• I often think, if NLP people put as much effort into the training data as the algorithms, our systems would perform much better.
  • in Discussion on Corpora-list (2 February 2015)

• It's like the 'normalisation' discussion because in both cases we dream of a 'true message' that, in the NLG case, we generate from, and in the normalisation and analysis cases, we normalise/analyse to. Of course the 'true message' is a fantasy, and what we think it should be will depend on our particular goals in our particular context.
  • in Discussion on Corpora-list (5 March 2015)

Quotes about person/work

• ...his contributions to lexicography, mainly in the form of Sketch Engine and its associated corpora, are immeasurable. Dictionaries now and far into the future are better for the work he has done.
  • Orin Hargraves (18 May 2015) (e.g. in News Dictionary Society of North America)

External links

• Adam Kilgarriff's blog
• Britain is no longer a country for and says "Farewell" to its Prince of Linguists, Adam Kilgarriff