Christiane Fellbaum
Christiane D. Fellbaum (born 30 November 1950) is a Lecturer with Rank of Professor in the Program in Linguistics and the Computer Science Department at Princeton University. The co-developer of the WordNet project, she is also its current director. Biography. Fellbaum was born in Braunschweig (Brunswick, Germany) but has lived in the US since 1969. She received a Ph.D. from Princeton University in linguistics in 1980 and later joined Princeton's Cognitive Science Laboratory, working with George Armitage Miller. Together with Miller and his team, she was a creator of WordNet, a large lexical database that serves  as a widely used resource in computational linguistics and natural language processing. Many researchers have since built upon her work, including AI researcher Fei-Fei Li, the inventor of ImageNet, which was inspired by a 2006 conversation with Fellbaum as well as by the name and design of the original WordNet. She is a founder and president of the Global WordNet Association, which guides the construction of lexical databases in many languages. She is a site coordinator of the North American Computational Linguistics Open competition. Her research focuses on lexical semantics, the syntax-semantics interface, and computational linguistics. Awards and  honors. In 2001, Fellbaum was one of fourteen scientists to receive the Wolfgang-Paul Prize of the Humboldt Foundation. She used her award money (1.53 million Euros) to construct an electronic database of German idioms ('Kollokationen im Wörterbuch'), a three-year project that she led at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. The goal of the project, which focused on collocations that combine nouns with verbs, was to analyze and record a wide range of German-language idioms. In 2006, she and WordNet collaborator George A. Miller were awarded the Antonio Zampolli Prize of the European Language Resources Association . According to the ELRA website, the prize recognizes "individuals whose work lies within the areas of Language Resources and Language Technology Evaluation with acknowledged contributions to their advancements."