Madeleine Ashcraft Bates (born c. 1948) is a researcher in natural language processing who worked at BBN Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts from the early 1970s to the late 1990s.^[1] She was president of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1985,^[2] and co-editor of the book Challenges in Natural Language Processing (1993).^[3]

Bates was a student at Allegheny College before transferring to Carnegie Mellon University,^[4] where she majored in mathematics, graduating in 1968. She completed her Ph.D. in applied mathematics at Harvard University in 1975,^[5] working there with Bill Woods on augmented transition networks.^[6]

While a student at Harvard, she began working part-time at BBN in 1971. After completing her Ph.D., she was an assistant professor at Boston University for three years before becoming a full-time researcher at BBN.^[5]

Bates married chemist Alan Hunt Bates in summer 1968;^[4] he later became a professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Her mother, Madeleine DeMuth Ashcraft (died 1990), was a long-term sufferer of Huntington's disease,^[7] and Bates has been an activist for the treatment of Huntington's disease, serving as president of the Massachusetts Chapter of the committee to Combat Huntington's Disease.^[8]

• Bates, M. (February 1975), "The use of syntax in a speech understanding system", IEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 23 (1): 112–117, doi:10.1109/tassp.1975.1162640
• Bates, Madeleine (1978), "The theory and practice of augmented transition network grammars", in Bolc, Leonard (ed.), Natural Language Communication with Computers, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 63, Springer-Verlag, pp. 191–254, doi:10.1007/bfb0031372
• Bates, Madeleine (1982), "AI Research at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, Inc", AI Magazine, 3 (2): 44–46, archived from the original on 2020-10-30, retrieved 2021-04-27
• Bates, Madeleine; Weischedel, Ralph M., eds. (1993), Challenges in Natural Language Processing, Studies in Natural Language Processing, Cambridge University Press
• Hirschman, L.; Tzoukermann, E.; Bates, M.; Dahl, D.; Fisher, W.; Garofolo, J.; Pallett, D.; Hunicke-Smith, K.; Price, P.; Rudnicky, A. (1993), "Multi-site data collection and evaluation in spoken language understanding", Proceedings of the Workshop on Human Language Technology - HLT '93 (PDF), Association for Computational Linguistics, doi:10.3115/1075671.1075676
• Dahl, Deborah A.; Bates, Madeleine; Brown, Michael; Fisher, William; Hunicke-Smith, Kate; Pallett, David; Pao, Christine; Rudnicky, Alexander; Shriberg, Elizabeth (1994), "Expanding the scope of the ATIS task", Proceedings of the workshop on Human Language Technology - HLT '94 (PDF), Association for Computational Linguistics, doi:10.3115/1075812.1075823
• Bates, M. (October 1995), "Models of natural language understanding", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 92 (22): 9977–9982, Bibcode:1995PNAS...92.9977B, doi:10.1073/pnas.92.22.9977, PMC 40721, PMID 7479812
• Bates, Madeleine; Bobrow, Robert J. (1997), "Using BBN VALAD: Speech at the Logistics Anchor Desk", 5th Applied Natural Language Processing Conference, ANLP 1997, Marriott Hotel, Washington, USA, March 31 - April 3, 1997, Association for Computational Linguistics, p. 35, doi:10.3115/974281.974303