Frederick Jelinek (18 November 1932 – 14 September 2010) was a Czech-American researcher in information theory, automatic speech recognition, and natural language processing.
[note 1] Jelinek was born in Czechoslovakia before 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 accepting a job at IBM Research.
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.
[3][4] Jelínek senior, a dentist, had planned early to escape Nazi occupation and flee to England; he arranged for a passport, visa, and the shipping of his dentistry materials.
His mother, anxious that her son should get a good education, made great efforts for their emigration,[note 2] especially when it became clear he would not be allowed to even attempt the graduation examination.
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 met with his old friend Miloš Forman, who introduced him to film student Milena Tobolová—whose screenplay had been the basis for the movie Easy Life (Snadný život).
[4][8] After completing his graduate studies, Jelinek, who had developed an interest in linguistics, had plans to work with Charles F. Hockett at Cornell University.
[5][7] 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.
[3][5][10] 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.
It will be all too easy for our somewhat artificial prosperity to collapse overnight when it is realized that the use of a few exciting words like information, entropy, redundancy, do not solve all our problems.
"[12] During the next decade, a combination of factors shut down the application of information theory to natural language processing (NLP) problems—in particular machine translation.
Jelinek regarded speech recognition as an information theory problem—a noisy channel, in this case the acoustic signal—which some observers considered a daring approach.
[14][11][15] The concept of perplexity was introduced in their first model,[7] New Raleigh Grammar, which was published in 1976 as the paper "Continuous Speech Recognition by Statistical Methods" in the journal Proceedings of the IEEE.
[14] According to Young, the basic noisy channel approach "reduced the speech recognition problem to one of producing two statistical models".
[6][7] He received an honoris causa Ph.D. from Charles University in 2001,[20] was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2006 and was made one of twelve inaugural fellows of the International Speech Communication Association in 2008.
Although its fame and iconic status are undisputed (it was for example used as the title of a 1998 speech by Julia Hirschberg),[21] its context is unknown and its specific wording and dating are unclear.
According to Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin, Jelinek himself recalled the quote as "Anytime a linguist leaves the group the recognition rate goes up" and dated it to December 1988 (Wayne, Pennsylvania), further noting that the quote did not appear in the published proceeding,[22][23] whereas Roger K. Moore gave the wording as "Every time we fire a phonetician/linguist, the performance of our system goes up" and dated it to an IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding workshop held in 1985.