Lauri Juhani Karttunen (September 29, 1941 – March 20, 2022)[1] was an adjunct professor in linguistics at Stanford and an ACL Fellow.
He published a series of seminal papers on discourse referents, presuppositions, implicative verbs, conventional implicatures, and questions.
In the 1980s Karttunen became, along with Ronald M. Kaplan, Martin Kay, and Kimmo Koskenniemi, one of the pioneers in computational linguistics on the application of finite-state transducers to phonology and morphology.
[7] Commercial versions of the finite-state technology developed by Karttunen and his colleagues at PARC and XRCE have been licensed by Xerox to many companies including SAP and Microsoft.
Karttunen was one of the seventeen selected for the founding group of ACL Fellows "whose contributions to the field have been most extraordinary.