It is with great sadness that I share the news of Lauri Karttunen's untimely passing. A
recipient of the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award (2007) and a founding ACL Fellow, Lauri
was a famously understated but extremely influential figure in computational linguistics.
He made foundational contributions to diverse areas including discourse referents,
presupposition plugs/holes/filters, implicative verbs, finite state methods, computational
morphophonology, and natural language inference.
After completing his PhD at Indiana University in Bloomington in 1969, Lauri spent around
a decade at the University of Texas at Austin before taking up a position at Xerox PARC.
He retired from PARC in 2011, but continued his long research association with Stanford
University as Adjunct Professor until very recently.
His death is a great loss for computational linguistics, and for all those who were
fortunate enough to have known and worked with him.
Tim Baldwin, on behalf of the ACL Executive