Remembering Richard Kittredge

Richard Kittredge passed away in early April, 2019. Richard had been a long-standing member of the ACL community. He obtained his PhD in 1969 at the University of Pennsylvania with Zellig Harris and Henry Hiz, working on tense and aspect. He subsequently became a professor at the Université de Montréal, where he spent his entire academic career. In the 1970s, Richard became a member of the TAUM research group on machine translation. The TAUM effort enabled one of the first commercial applications of machine translation, the METEO system in Canada. Richard’s early work on machine translation led him to develop deeper interests in three areas: the linguistic study of sublanguages; the computational use of Igor Mel’čuk’s Meaning-Text Theory; and multilingual natural language generation (NLG) as an alternative to machine translation. He and his collaborators made foundational contributions in each of these areas. While still at the Université de Montréal, he co-founded CoGenTex, an early start-up dedicated to natural language generation, which built the first operationally fielded NLG system, the FoG weather forecast generator. He will be greatly missed by family and friends alike.