astronomy

William Aaron Woods

William Aaron Woods is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand William Aaron Woods rather than just read about it. In short: William Aaron Woods (born June 17, 1942), generally known as Bill Woods, is a researcher in natural language processing, continuous speech understanding, knowledge representation, and knowledge-based search technology. He is currently a Software Engineer at Google.

Key takeaways

William Aaron Woods belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect William Aaron Woods to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of William Aaron Woods from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

William Aaron Woods (born June 17, 1942), generally known as Bill Woods, is a researcher in natural language processing, continuous speech understanding, knowledge representation, and knowledge-based search technology. He is currently a Software Engineer at Google.

Education Woods received a bachelor's degree from Ohio Wesleyan University (1964) and a Master's (1965) and Ph.D. (1968) in applied mathematics from Harvard University, where he then served as an assistant professor and later as a Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science.

Research Woods built one of the first natural language question answering systems (LUNAR) to answer questions about the Apollo 11 Moon rocks for the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center while he was at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At BBN, he was a principal scientist and manager of the Artificial Intelligence Department in the '70's and early '80's. He was the principal investigator for BBN's early work in natural language processing and knowledge representation and for its first project in continuous speech understanding. Subsequently, he was chief scientist for Applied Expert Systems and Principal Technologist for ON Technology, Cambridge start-ups. In 1991, he joined Sun Microsystems Laboratories as a principal scientist and distinguished engineer, and in 2007, he joined ITA Software as a distinguished software engineer. ITA was acquired by Google in 2011, where he now works. Woods' 1975 paper "What's in a Link" is a widely cited critical review of early work in semantic networks. This paper has been cited in the context of querying and natural language processing approaches that make use of Semantic Networks and general knowledge modeling. The paper attempts to clarify notions of meaning and semantics in computational systems. Woods further elaborated on the issues and how they relate to contemporary systems in "Meaning and Links" (2007).

Awards Woods has received many honors:

1978, Fulbright Fellowship 1990, Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence 1992, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 2010, Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award

Selected works Woods, W. A. (1970). "Transition network grammars for natural language analysis". Communications of the ACM. 13 (10): 591–606. doi:10.1145/355598.362773. S2CID 18366823. "The Lunar Sciences Natural Language Information System: Final Report" (with R. M. Kaplan and B.L. Nash-Webber), BBN Report No. 2378, Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge, MA 02138, June, 1972. (Available from the National Technical Reports Library of NTIS as N72-28984.) Speech-Understanding Systems: Final Report of a Study Group, (with A. Newell, chairman, et al. .), North-Holland/American Elsevier, 1973. "An Experimental parsing System for Transition Network Grammars", in R. Rustin (ed.), Natural Language Processing, New York: Algorithmics Press, 1973. "Progress in Natural Language Understanding: An Application to Lunar Geology," AFIPS Conference Proceedings 42 (1973 National Computer Conference and Exposition). "What's in a Link: Foundations for Semantic Networks" in D. Bobrow and A. Collins (eds.), Representation and Understanding: Studies in Cognitive Science, New York: Academic Press, 1975. Reprinted in R. Brachman and H. Levesque (eds.), Readings in Knowledge Representation, San Mateo: Morgan Kaufmann, 1985. Also reprinted in Allan Collins and Edward E. Smith (eds.), Readings in Cognitive Science, San Mateo: Morgan Kaufmann, 1988. "Procedural Semantics as a Theory of Meaning" in A. Joshi, B. L. Webber and I. Sag (eds.), Elements of Discourse Understanding, Cambridge University Press, 1981. "Optimal Search Strategies for Speech Understanding Control", Artificial Intelligence 18:3:295-326, May 1982. "What's Important About Knowledge Representation?," IEEE Computer 16:10, October 1983. "Artificial Intelligence", in Lisa Taylor (ed.), The Phenomenon of Change, New York: Rizzoli, 1984. Computer Speech Processing, (ed. with Frank Fallside), Prentice-Hall International (UK) Ltd., 1985. "Understanding Subsumption and Taxonomy: A Framework for Progress," in John Sowa (ed.), Principles of Semantic Networks: Explorations in the Representation of Knowledge, San Mateo:Morgan Kaufmann, 1991, pp 45–94. "Conceptual Indexing: A Better Way to Organize Knowledge," Technical Report SMLI TR-97-61, Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Mountain View, CA, April, 1997. "Linguistic Knowledge can Improve Information Retrieval," with Lawrence A. Bookman, Ann Houston, Robert J. Kuhns, Paul Martin, and Stephen Green, Proceedings of ANLP-2000, Seattle, WA, May 1–3, 2000, (Final version with author's introduction is reprinted in Sun Labs' anniversary volume, Sun Microsystems Laboratories: The First Ten Years, 1991-2001.) "Meaning and Links: a Semantic Odyssey," AI Magazine 28:4 (Winter 2007). full text

References

External links Official website

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with William Aaron Woods

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what William Aaron Woods claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to William Aaron Woods before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about William Aaron Woods ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of William Aaron Woods

In research: William Aaron Woods appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses William Aaron Woods in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: William Aaron Woods is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1942 births, Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for William Aaron Woods outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study William Aaron Woods in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what William Aaron Woods means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain William Aaron Woods out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is William Aaron Woods in simple terms?

Why does William Aaron Woods matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study William Aaron Woods?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on William Aaron Woods.