Frederick Jelinek

his oft-quoted statement that 'for every ten-fold increase in the amount of data, the speech recognizer's performance improves by one percent'

• pioneered the application of mathematical techniques from information theory to speech recognition
• worked on the development of statistical language models
• was a key figure in the early days of modern speech recognition technology

Frederick Jelinek was a Czech-American researcher who made significant contributions to information theory, automatic speech recognition, and natural language processing.

Milestones

• 1986
  Expert Systems and the Knowledge Boom Research

  Teaching Machines to Listen

  IBM's speech recognition team, led by Fred Jelinek, proved that statistical methods could understand human speech better than any linguistic approach — famously quipping that firing linguists improved the system.

  1986

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