Ronald M. Kaplan (born 1946) has served as a vice president at Amazon.com and chief scientist for Amazon Search (A9.com).
Prior to that he served as chief scientist and a principal researcher at the Powerset division of Microsoft Bing.
He designed (in collaboration with Joan Bresnan) the formal theory of Lexical Functional Grammar and produced its initial computational implementation.
He developed (with Martin Kay) the mathematical, linguistic, and computational concepts that underlie the use of finite-state phonological and morphological descriptions.
In 2006, he was honored with a festschrift titled Intelligent linguistic architectures: variations on themes by Ronald M. Kaplan, published by CSLI Publications.