Eva Hajičová [ˈɛva ˈɦajɪt͡ʃovaː] (born 23 August 1935) is a Czech linguist, specializing in topic–focus articulation and corpus linguistics. In 2006, she was awarded the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Lifetime Achievement Award.[1] She was named a fellow of the ACL in 2011.[2]

Eva Hajičová
Born (1935-08-23) 23 August 1935 (age 89)
Alma materCharles University
Scientific career
FieldsLinguistics
InstitutionsFaculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University

Biography

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Eva Hajičová got an undergraduate degree in English and Czech in 1958 from Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. She went on to graduate with a PhD and a DrSc (Doctor of Sciences) degree in general and computational linguistics. She works at her Alma mater, Charles University, where her research interest areas include corpus linguistics, as well as computational areas in semantic and syntactic sentence structure[3]

Her participation in research has reached many publications, organizations, and boards. Such journal involvements include “Kybernetika”, “Computers and Artificial Intelligence”, “Journal of Pragmatics”, and “Linguistica Pragensia”.

She also became a part of research or intellectually focused organizations, with membership in the International Committee of Computational Linguistics from 1978 to present, first chair and founding board member of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics from 1982 to 1987,[4] chairpersonship of the Prague Linguistic Circle from 1997 to 2006, presidency and fellowship in the International Association for Computational Linguistics in 1998, elected membership in the Learned Society of Czech Republic from 2004 to present, and presidency and honorary membership in the Societas Linguistica Europaea from 2006 to 2007.[5]

Honors and awards

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Year Award Reason
1995 Alexander Von Humboldt Research Prize
2003 The Medal of the Minister of Education of Czech Republic Recognition of the pedagogical and scientific work in computational linguistics.
2006 ACL Life Achievement Award
2017 Josef Hlávka Medal Life-time achievements in science and arts.
2018 Antonio Zampolli Prize Outstanding contributions to the advancement of language resources and language technology evaluation within human language technologies.
2023 Neil and Saras Smith Medal Lifetime achievement in the study of linguistics.

Research

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In the book The Meaning of the Sentence in Its Semantic and Pragmatic Aspects she and her two co-authors, Petr Sgall and Jarmila Panevová, formulate a new description of natural language termed Functional Generative Description (FGD). The description is dependency-based, integrating both the syntactic structure of natural language and the topic-focus articulation, or the information that is intended for communication. The method is not English bound, and strives to be a universal grammar descriptor.[6]

She assisted in creating and updating The Prague Dependency Treebank, a database of Czech Language annotated with three tiers of linguistic information. The lowest level is the morphological annotation about the structure of the individual words, the second level is termed the analytical level, and is marked with syntactic information. The highest level of annotation is called the tectogrammatical level (deep syntax), and shows the dependencies and relationships between the words. [7]

Selected publications

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  • Hajic, J., Panevová, J., Hajicová, E., Sgall, P., Pajas, P., Štepánek, J., ... & Urešová, Z. 2006. Prague dependency treebank 2.0. CD-ROM, linguistic data consortium, LDC Catalog No.: LDC2006T01, Philadelphia, 98.
  • Hajicová, E., B.H. Partee, and P. Sgall. 1998. Topic-focus articulation, tripartite structures and semantic content. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ISBN 9789401590129
  • Hajičová, E., 1993. Issues of sentence structure and discourse patterns (Vol. 2). Charles University.
  • Hajičová, E., 1985. Topic, and focus. In Contributions to functional syntax, semantics and language comprehension (p. 189). John Benjamins.

    Sgall, P., Eva
  • Hajicová, Jarmila Panevová. 1986 -The Meaning of the Sentence in Its Semantic and Pragmatic Aspects. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 9789027718389

References

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  1. ^ "ACL Lifetime Achievement Award citation". Archived from the original on 2010-06-12. Retrieved 2009-07-30.
  2. ^ "ACL Fellows". ACL Wiki. Retrieved 15 August 2017.
  3. ^ "Neil and Saras Smith Medal for Linguistics". The British Academy. Retrieved 2024-04-15.
  4. ^ "General". Association for Computational Linguistics European Chapter. Retrieved 24 April 2024.
  5. ^ "Eva Hajičová | ÚFAL". ufal.mff.cuni.cz. Retrieved 2024-04-24.
  6. ^ Koktová, Eva (1991-09-01). "The meaning of the sentence in its semantic and pragmatic aspects: Petr Sgall, Eva Hajičová and Jarmila Panevová, Prague: Academia and Dordrecht: Reidel, 1986. 339 pp". Lingua. 85 (1): 72–80. doi:10.1016/0024-3841(91)90048-A. ISSN 0024-3841.
  7. ^ Hajic, Jan (January 2005). "Complex Corpus Annotation: The Prague Dependency Treebank". www.academia.edu. Retrieved 2024-04-08.
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Preceded by ACL Lifetime Achievement Award
2006
Succeeded by