Stuart Shieber

Stuart Shieber is the James O. Welch, Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. He is a prominent researcher in computational linguistics and natural language processing, with significant contributions across multiple related fields including theoretical linguistics, computer-human interaction, automated graphic design, and the philosophy of artificial intelligence.

Professor Shieber's research interests focus primarily on computational linguistics, examining natural language from the perspective of computer science. His work spans scientific and engineering goals, utilizing foundational formal and mathematical tools. He has made significant contributions to grammar formalisms, psycholinguistics, semantics, and synchronous grammars with applications in machine translation and sentence compression. Beyond computational linguistics, his research extends to automatic layout of charts and maps, novel interaction techniques for document reading and diagram layout, online auction mechanisms, library book access prediction, biological evolution tree reconstruction, and the philosophical basis for Turing's test for machine intelligence.

His recent publications demonstrate a continued focus on neural language models, syntactic agreement mechanisms, readability assessment, conversational understanding, and bias detection in language models. His research has evolved from traditional grammar formalisms to incorporate modern neural network approaches while maintaining a strong theoretical foundation. The trend shows increasing attention to ethical considerations in NLP, particularly around bias detection and mitigation, alongside continued theoretical work on language structure.

• Presidential Young Investigator award (1991)
• Presidential Faculty Fellow (1993)
• John L. Loeb Associate Professorship in Natural Sciences (1993)
• Harvard College Professorship (2001)
• Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (2004)
• Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (2014)
• Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2017)

Professor Shieber has advised numerous PhD students who have gone on to successful careers at institutions including UCSD, Cornell University, Microsoft Research, Google, and various academic institutions. His work on open access and scholarly communication policy, particularly his development of Harvard's open-access policies, led to his appointment as the first director of the university's Office for Scholarly Communication. He is also the founding director of the Center for Research on Computation and Society and a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

His laboratory work has focused on advancing computational linguistics through both theoretical and applied research, with numerous patents and co-founding of Cartesian Products, Inc., a high-technology research and development company. His future work appears to be focusing on the intersection of neural network approaches with traditional linguistic theory, particularly in understanding and mitigating bias in language models, while continuing his long-standing interest in the theoretical foundations of language processing.