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Frederick Jelinek (18 November 1932 – 14 September 2010) was a Czech-American researcher in information theory, automatic speech recognition, and natural language processing. He was well known for his oft-quoted statement, "Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up". Jelinek was born in Czechoslovakia just before the outbreak of World War II and emigrated with his family to the United States in the early years of the communist regime. He studied engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and taught for 10 years at Cornell University before being offered a job at IBM Research. In 1961, he married Czech screenwriter Milena Jelinek. At IBM, his team advanced approaches to computer speech recognition and machine translation. After IBM, he went to head the Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University for 17 years, where he was still working on the day he died. == Personal life == Jelinek was born on November 18, 1932, as Bedřich Jelínek〔 in Kladno to Vilém and Trude Jelinek.〔 His father was Jewish; his mother was born in Switzerland to Czech Catholic parents and had converted to Judaism.〔〔 Jelinek senior, a dentist, had planned early for an escape to England; he arranged for a passport, visa, and the shipping of his dentistry materials. The couple planned to send their son to an English private school. However, Vilém decided to stay at the last minute and was eventually sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp,〔 where he died in 1945.〔〔 The family was forced to move to Prague in 1941, but Frederick, his sister and motherthanks to the latter's backgroundescaped the concentration camps.〔 After the war, Jelinek entered in the gymnasium, despite having missed several years of schooling because education of Jewish children had been forbidden since 1942. His mother, anxious that her son should get a good education, made great efforts for their emigration,〔As he put it, "she didn't want to emulate my father's big mistake."〕 especially when it became clear he would not be allowed to even attempt the graduation examination. His mother hoped her son would become a physician, but Jelinek dreamed of being a lawyer. He studied engineering in evening classes at the City College of New York and received stipends from the National Committee for a Free Europe that allowed him to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. About his choice of specialty, he said: "Fortunately, to electrical engineering there belonged a discipline whose aim was not the construction of physical systems: the theory of information".〔 He obtained his Ph.D. in 1962, with Robert Fano as his adviser.〔〔 In 1957, Jelinek paid an unexpected visit to Prague. He had been in Vienna and applied for a visa, hoping to see his former acquaintances again. He met with his old friend Miloš Forman, who introduced him to film student Milena Tabolovawhose screenplay had been the basis for the movie ''Easy Life'' (''Snadný život'').〔〔 His flight back to the U.S. had a stopover in Munich, during which he called her to propose.〔 Tabolova was considered a dissident and the authorities were not happy with her film.〔 Jelinek asked for help from Jerome Wiesner and Cyrus Eaton, the latter who lobbied Nikita Khrushchev.〔 Following the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, a group of Czech dissidents were allowed to emigrate in January 1961. Thanks to the lobbying, the future Milena Jelinek was one of them.〔〔 After completing his graduate studies, Jelinek, who had developed an interest in linguistics, had plans to work with Charles F. Hockett at Cornell University. However these fell through and during the next ten years he continued to study information theory.〔 Having previously worked at IBM during a sabbatical, he began full-time work there in 1972at first on leave for Cornell, but permanently from 1974. He remained there for over twenty years. Although at first he had been offered a regular research job, upon his arrival he learned that Josef Raviv had recently been promoted to head of the newly opened IBM Haifa Research Laboratory, and became head of the Continuous Speech Recognition group at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center.〔〔 Despite his team's successes in this area, Jelinek's work remained little known in his home country because Czech scientists were not allowed to participate in key conferences.〔 After the 1989 fall of communism, Jelinek helped establish scientific relationships, regularly visiting to lecture and helping to persuade IBM to establish a computing centre at Charles University.〔〔〔 In 1993, he retired from IBM and went to Johns Hopkins University's Center for Language and Speech Processing, where he was director and Julian Sinclair Smith Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.〔〔 He was still working there at the time of his death; Jelinek died of a heart attack at the close of an otherwise normal workday in mid-September 2010.〔〔 He was survived by his wife, daughter and son, sister, stepsister, and three grandchildren.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Frederick Jelinek」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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