Margaret Masterman (1910-1986) was a British linguist and philosopher who became a pioneer of computational linguistics and machine translation at a time when the field barely existed. A student at Newnham College, Cambridge, she attended Ludwig Wittgenstein’s lectures and was one of the few selected to take notes that were later compiled as part of “The Blue Book.”
In the mid-1950s Masterman founded and directed the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU), which grew from an informal discussion group into a significant center for research on machine translation and natural language. In the November 1956 issue of Mechanical Translation, her group reported work on using a mechanical thesaurus for translation. In her section, “Potentialities of a Mechanical Thesaurus,” she argued that the right unit for a machine dictionary is “the semantically significant chunk, not the free word,” and proposed organizing meaning as a lattice of related concepts rather than a simple word list.
Her thesaurus-based, semantic approach was unfashionable during the era when machine translation funding collapsed after the 1966 ALPAC report, but it anticipated later ideas about semantic networks and distributional meaning. Researchers she trained, including Karen Sparck Jones and Yorick Wilks, carried her ideas into the modern study of language and computation.