The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) mourns the passing of Remko Jan Hendrik Scha (15 September 1945 – 9 November 2015), who made important contributions to the study of semantics, and discourse analysis through his work on Dynamic Discourse Model (with Livia Polanyi). Remko Scha was a professor of computational linguistics at the faculty of humanities and Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam, who was committed towards the training of many generations of computational linguistic scholars, including Rens Bod and Khalil Sima'an, and continued doctoral supervision after obtaining his emeritus professorship. Scha was the founder of the Data Oriented Parsing (DOP) paradigm known to many in computational linguistics, which found its way as the foundation for many concrete projects as well as being one of the precursors to the statistical revolution in natural language processing.
Scha was also very active in the arts community in the Netherlands, pioneering algorithmic arts in music and helping foster subsequent generations of artists through his founding the Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam (IAAA).