head.png

Kyle P. Johnson PhD

I am a humanist and technologist with specialization in the AI subdomain of NLP (natural language processing).

My recent professional work has centered around AI strategy and zero-to-one product development. Outside of industry, my research revolves around the Classical Language Toolkit (CLTK), which brings state-of-the-art NLP to scholars of the ancient world.

I referee for conferences frequently, lecture occasionally (slides in blog), and publish rarely.

selected publications

  1. cltk.gif
    The Classical Language Toolkit: An NLP Framework for Pre-Modern Languages
    Kyle P. Johnson, Patrick J. Burns, John Stewart, and
    3 more authorsTodd Cook, Clément Besnier, William J. B. Mattingly
    In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, Aug2021
    HTMLPDF
    Abstract

    This paper announces version 1.0 of the Classical Language Toolkit (CLTK), an NLP framework for pre-modern languages. The vast majority of NLP, its algorithms and software, is created with assumptions particular to living languages, thus neglecting certain important characteristics of largely non-spoken historical languages. Further, scholars of pre-modern languages often have different goals than those of living-language researchers. To fill this void, the CLTK adapts ideas from several leading NLP frameworks to create a novel software architecture that satisfies the unique needs of pre-modern languages and their researchers. Its centerpiece is a modular processing pipeline that balances the competing demands of algorithmic diversity with pre-configured defaults. The CLTK currently provides pipelines, including models, for almost 20 languages.

    BibTeX 
    @inproceedings{johnson-etal-2021-classical,
  title = {The {C}lassical {L}anguage {T}oolkit: {A}n {NLP} Framework for Pre-Modern Languages},
  author = {Johnson, Kyle P. and Burns, Patrick J. and Stewart, John and Cook, Todd and Besnier, Clément and Mattingly, William J. B.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations},
  month = aug,
  year = {2021},
  address = {Online},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-demo.3},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2021.acl-demo.3},
  pages = {20--29}
}

Recent Posts