We are delighted to award the 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award to Martha Palmer, Arts and Sciences Professor of Distinction for Linguistics and former Helen & Hubert Croft Professor of Engineering in the Computer Science Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She has made tremendous contributions to NLP, multilingual resources, and supervised ML in lexical-semantic processing. Her work in computational semantics has been hugely influential in the field, both through the semantic representations that she has developed and through the annotated resources that she has created. Her seminal work includes PropBank, a corpus annotated with semantic role labels. PropBank has been influential as an extremely widely used resource, but also as a schema for how to specify semantic roles, which has been taken over in subsequent resources. Importantly, while the original PropBank was in English, she has also developed PropBanks for other languages, including Chinese, Korean, Arabic, and Hindi. VerbNet is another important resource introduced by her, a classification of verbs into semantic classes, again with semantic roles, extending the Levin verb classes. She has also been instrumental in the development of Abstract Meaning Representations, semantic representations for sentences that go beyond word senses and semantic roles but are simpler than logical form. Along with the resources themselves, which have been widely used to train NLP models, the design choices and linguistic insights built into those resources have been extremely influential in NLP.
Professor Palmer served as president of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2005. She is also the past chair of both SIGLEX and SIGHAN. She is co-editor of LiLT (Linguistic Issues in Language Technology), and has been a co-editor of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering and on the CLJ Editorial Board. She was named an ACL Fellow in 2014 "for significant contributions to computational semantics and the development of semantic corpora". She served as advisor to numerous PhD students. She has also been a role model for a whole generation of young female researchers.