Rate My Professor Stuart Shieber

Stuart Shieber is the James O. Welch, Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He serves as Area Chair for Computer Science and holds affiliate appointments in the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Philosophy. A 1981 graduate of Harvard College, Shieber earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1989. His primary research area is computational linguistics, the study of natural language from the standpoint of computer science. This work pursues both scientific and engineering goals, drawing on foundational formal and mathematical tools.

Shieber investigates how natural languages are structured to permit efficient communication, addressing issues in linguistics, theoretical computer science, computer systems, psychology, and artificial intelligence. His research includes the computational properties of grammar formalisms, psycholinguistics models of sentence processing, semantics of elliptical constructions using higher-order logic, and synchronous grammars applied to machine translation and sentence compression. He has also contributed to areas such as the automated layout of informational graphics, novel document interaction techniques, mechanisms for fair and private online auctions, prediction of library book access patterns, reconstruction of evolutionary tree structures, and the philosophical basis of the Turing test. In 2017, Shieber was named an ACL Fellow for his contributions to computational linguistics. He played a key role in authoring Harvard’s open access mandate.