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Naomi Sager is best known for her work in Natural Language Processing and as the director of the Linguistic String Project] at New York University from 1965 into the years 2000.

Early years

Sager was born in Chicago, in 1927. From 1942-1946 she attended the newly established Four Year College at the University of Chicago receiving the degree Bachelor of Philosophy in 1946.

In 1941 she joined the Chicago branch of the kibbutz-oriented Socialist-Zionist Youth Movement Hashomer Hatzair. She served as Chicago branch leader and director of the HH Midwest regional summer camps during 1945-1948. In 1947 she apprenticed in a wood working shop in Chicago in preparation for life in a kibbutz and in1949-1950 she lived in Kibbutz Givat Brenner where she worked in their custom furniture factory. Her attempt to replace the labor-intensive hand finishing of furniture by the spray-gun technology learned in Chicago was accepted enthusiastically but ultimately failed due to import restrictions on materials.

In 1953 Sager obtained a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University and from 1953-1958 worked as an electronics engineer in the Biophysics Department of the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in New York.

Computational Linguistics

In 1959 Sager worked as a member of the team at the University of Pennsylvania that developed the first English language parsing program. Her job was to deal with syntactic ambiguity (more than one possible analysis) at points in the sentence. The structures imposed by the 1959 program proved unwieldy for this task and in 1960 she devised an algorithm based on Linguistic String Theory in which the treatment of ambiguity was an integral part. The algorithm and an initial string grammar was published in 1960 "A Procedure for Left to Right Analysis of Sentence Structure" in the University of Pennsylvania's series Transformations and Discourse Analysis Papers. Implementation of the algorithm and string grammar of English became the basis for the Linguistic String Project at NYU in 1965. In 1968 she obtained a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Sager is the author of Natural Language Information Processing: A Computer Grammar of English and Its Applications. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass. 1981 and other publications at her NYU Computer Science home page.