Obituary: Charles J. Fillmore

Charles J. Fillmore died at his home in San Francisco on February 13, 2014, of brain cancer. He was 84 years old. Fillmore was one of the world’s pre-eminent scholars of lexical meaning and its relationship with context, grammar, corpora, and computation, and his work had an enormous impact on computational linguistics. His early theoretical work in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s on case grammar and then frame semantics significantly influenced computational linguistics, AI, and knowledge representation. More recent work in the last two decades on FrameNet, a computational lexicon and annotated corpus, influenced corpus linguistics and computational lexicography, and led to modern natural language understanding tasks like semantic role labeling. Fillmore was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, and studied linguistics at the University of Minnesota. As an undergraduate he worked on a pre-computational Latin corpus linguistics project, alphabetizing index cards and building concordances. During his service in the Army in the early 1950s he was stationed for three years in Japan. After his service he became the first US soldier to be discharged locally in Japan, and stayed for three years studying Japanese. He supported himself by teaching English, pioneering a way to make ends meet that afterwards became popular with generations of young Americans abroad. In 1957 he moved back to the United States to attend graduate school at the University of Michigan. At Michigan, Fillmore worked on phonetics, phonology, and syntax, first in the American Structuralist tradition of developing what were called “discovery procedures” for linguistic analysis, algorithms for inducing phones or parts of speech. Discovery procedures were thought of as a methodological tool, a formal procedure that linguists could apply to data to discover linguistic structure, for example inducing parts of speech from the slots in “sentence frames” informed by the distribution of surrounding words. Like many linguistic graduate students of the period, he also worked partly on machine translation, and was interviewed at the time by Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, who was touring US machine translation laboratories in preparation for his famous report on the state of MT (Bar-Hillel 1960). Early in his graduate career, however, Fillmore read Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures and became an immediate proponent of the new transformational grammar. He graduated with his PhD in 1962 and moved to the linguistics department at Ohio State University. In his early work there Fillmore developed a number of early formal properties of generative grammar, such as the idea that rules would re-apply to representations in iterative stages called cycles (Fillmore 1963), a formal mechanism that still plays a role in modern theories of generative grammar.