Madeleine Ashcraft Bates (born c. 1948) is a researcher in natural language processing who worked at BBN Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts from the early 1970s to the late 1990s.
[1] She was president of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1985,[2] and co-editor of the book Challenges in Natural Language Processing (1993).
[3] Bates was a student at Allegheny College before transferring to Carnegie Mellon University,[4] where she majored in mathematics, graduating in 1968.
She completed her Ph.D. in applied mathematics at Harvard University in 1975,[5] working there with Bill Woods on augmented transition networks.
After completing her Ph.D., she was an assistant professor at Boston University for three years before becoming a full-time researcher at BBN.