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Biography
David A. Evans (born 1948, St Louis, United States) is the president, CEO, and chief scientist of JustSystems Evans Research, Inc. (JSERI). He is a prominent figure in the field of computational linguistics, best known for research on work in indexing using natural language processing, and in ontology learning, especially in medical informatics.
He attended Stanford University, receiving his Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics there in 1982. He was on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University from 1983 until 1996, and founded their Computational Linguistics Program and Laboratory for Computational Linguistics in 1986. In 1993, his research was spun-out from Carnegie-Mellon as Claritech. Claritech became a research and development subsidiary of JustSystems and its name was changed to Clairvoyance Corporation in 1996, before becoming JSERI in 2007.
He has made many contributions to the field of computational linguistics and information retrieval, authoring books, many research papers and 24 US patents. From 1988 onwards, he developed the CLARIT system, one of the first large scale information indexing and extraction systems based on syntactic language analysis and ontology discovery.
Evans was elected a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics in 2000.