Frederick Jelinek

Frederick Jelinek (18 November 1932 – 14 September 2010) was a Czech-American researcher. His works focused in information theory, automatic speech recognition, and natural language processing. He was well known for his quote, "Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up".

Jelinek taught for 10 years at Cornell University before being offered a job at IBM Research. In 1961, he married Czech screenwriter Milena Jelinek. After IBM, he went to head the Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University for 17 years.

Jelinek died of a heart attack in Baltimore, Maryland on 14 September 2010 at the age of 77.