Yehoshua Bar-Hillel ( Hebrew : ????? ??-??? ; 3 June 1915, Vienna ? 1975, Jerusalem ) was an Israeli philosopher , mathematician , and linguist . He is perhaps best known for his pioneering work in machine translation and formal linguistics .

Biography

Born Oscar Westreich in Vienna, Austria-Hungary , he was raised in Berlin . In 1933 he emigrated to Palestine with the Bnei Akiva youth movement, and briefly joined the kibbutz Tirat Zvi before settling in Jerusalem and marrying Shulamith.

During World War II , he served in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army. He fought with the Haganah during the Israeli War of Independence , losing an eye.

Bar-Hillel received his PhD in Philosophy from the Hebrew University where he also studied mathematics under Abraham Fraenkel , with whom he eventually coauthored Foundations of Set Theory (1958, 1973).

Bar-Hillel was a major disciple of Rudolf Carnap , whose Logical Syntax of Language much influenced him. He began a correspondence with Carnap in the 1940s, which led to a 1950 postdoc under Carnap at the University of Chicago , and to his collaborating on Carnap's 1952 An Outline of the Theory of Semantic Information .

Bar-Hillel then took up a position at MIT , leaving in 1953 just before Noam Chomsky 's arrival. At MIT, Bar-Hillel was the first academic to work full-time in the field of Machine Translation ; he organised the first International Conference on Machine Translation in 1952. Later he expressed doubts that general-purpose fully automatic high-quality machine translation would ever be feasible. ^{[1] [2]} He was also a pioneer in the field of information retrieval .

In 1953, Bar-Hillel joined the philosophy department at the Hebrew University , where he taught until his death at age 60. His teachings and writings strongly influenced an entire generation of Israeli philosophers and linguists, including Asa Kasher and Avishai Margalit . In 1953, he founded a pioneering algebraic-computational linguistic group, and in 1961 he contributed to the proof of the pumping lemma for context-free languages (sometimes called the Bar-Hillel lemma). Bar-Hillel helped found the Hebrew University's department of Philosophy of Science . From 1966 to 1968 Bar-Hillel presided over the International Association of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science.

Bar-Hillel's daughter Maya Bar-Hillel is a cognitive psychologist at the Hebrew University , known for her collaborations with Amos Tversky and for her role in critiquing Bible code study. His other daughter, Mira Bar-Hillel, is the property and planning correspondent for the London Evening Standard . His granddaughter, Gili Bar-Hillel , is the Hebrew translator of the Harry Potter series.

Related terms

• Categorial grammar
• Indexical expression

Notes

1. ^ Melby, Alan. The Possibility of Language (Amsterdam:Benjamins, 1995, 27-41)
2. ^ Appendix III of 'The present status of automatic translation of languages', Advances in Computers, vol.1 (1960), p.158-163. Reprinted in Y.Bar-Hillel: Language and information (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1964), p.174-179.

Select bibliography

• 1954 - Indexical Expressions , in: Mind , Vol. 63, Pp. 359?379.
• 1958 - (with Abraham Fraenkel ) Foundations of Set Theory . 2nd ed. (also with Azriel Levy and Dirk van Dalen ), 1973.
• 1964 - Language and Information
• 1970 - Aspects of Language: Essays and Lectures on Philosophy of Language, Linguistic Philosophy and Methodology of Linguistics
• 1970 - Mathematical Logic and Foundations of Set Theory (Editor)
• 1972 - Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science (Editor)
• 1975 - Pragmatics of Natural Languages (Editor)

External links

• " Yehoshua Bar-Hillel: A Philosopher's Contribution to Machine Translation "
• " Bar-Hillel and Machine Translation: Then and Now. "
• Bar-Hillel Colloquium.
• Translation Trouble : Time Magazine article from 1954.

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