Yehoshua Bar-Hillel

From Freepedia

Yehoshua Bar-Hillel (1915–1975) was a philosopher, mathematician, and linguist at the [[Hebrew University]. He is best known for his pioneering work in the field of machine translation.

Bar-Hillel was born in Vienna in 1915, and raised in Berlin. In 1933 he emigrated from Germany to Palestine with the Bnei Akiva youth movement, and briefly joined the kibbutz Tirat-Zvi before settling in Jerusalem and marrying Shulamith.

Bar-Hillel served in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army. He later fought with the Hagganah and lost an eye in the Israeli War of Independence.

Bar-Hillel received his PhD in Philosophy from The Hebrew University. He also studied Mathematics under Abraham Fraenkel, with whom he later collaborated on The Foundations of Set Theory (1958).

Inspired by Rudolf Carnap's Logical Syntax of Language, Bar-Hillel set up a correspondence with Carnap throughout the 1940's. This led to a post doc with Carnap in 1950, and a collaboration on Carnap's An Outline of the Theory of Semantic Information in 1952.

Hired by MIT as the first academic to work full-time in the field of Machine Translation, Bar-Hillel organised the first International Conference on Machine Translation in 1952, but in later years he expressed doubts that general-purpose fully-automatic high-quality machine translation would ever be feasible. He was also a pioneer in the field of information retrieval.

In 1953 Bar-Hillel joined the faculty of the philosophy department at the Hebrew University, where he taught until his untimely death at 60 years old. That year he founded a pioneering algebraic-computational linguistic group, and in 1961 contributed to the development of the pumping lemma for context-free languages. Bar-Hillel was the first to teach game theory at the Hebrew University and was also a founder of its department of Philosphy of Science.

A generation of Israeli philosophers and linguists studied under him and were influenced by him, including such students as Assa Kasher and Avishai Margalit.

Bar-Hillel served as President of the International Association of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science from 1966 to 1968.

Bar-Hillel's daughter Maya Bar-Hillel is a cognitive psychologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; his daughter Mira Bar-Hillel is the Property Correspondent for the London Evening Standard.

Related terms

• Categorial grammar
• Indexical expression

Select bibliography

• 1958 - with Abraham Fraenkel and Azriel Levi, Foundations of Set Theory
• 1964 - Language and Information
• 1970 - Aspects of Language: Essays and Lectures on Philosophy of Language, Linguistic Philosophy and Methodology of Linguistics
• 1972 - Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science (Editor)
• 1975 - Pragmatics of Natural Languages (Editor)

External links

• PDF entry for Yehoshua Bar-Hillel in the Encyclopedia of Linguistics
• Bar-Hillel and Machine Translation: Then and Now (PDF)
• Milestones in Machine Translation
• Bar-Hillel Colloquium