Roger Schank (March 12, 1946 - January 29, 2023) was a computer scientist and cognitive scientist who held professorships at Stanford from 1968 to 1973, Yale from 1974 to 1989, and Northwestern from 1989 onward, where he was the John Evans Professor of Computer Science, Education, and Psychology. Northwestern’s memorial calls him “a foundational pioneer in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and learning sciences,” focused on language processing, cognition, and memory organization.
Schank’s central contribution to natural language processing was conceptual dependency theory, a way of representing the meaning of a sentence in a language-independent form built from a small set of primitive actions, so that two sentences saying the same thing in different words would map to the same internal structure. The goal was machine understanding rather than surface parsing - getting at what a sentence means, not just how it is built.
With his students he extended this into scripts, structures that capture the stereotyped sequence of events in familiar situations such as eating at a restaurant, giving programs the background knowledge to infer what was left unsaid. This line of work helped lay the basis for case-based reasoning, where systems solve new problems by adapting remembered past cases.
In his later career Schank turned to education, founding Northwestern’s Institute for the Learning Sciences in 1989 with a $30 million grant and helping create the first doctoral program in learning sciences. He co-founded the journal Cognitive Science in 1977 and the Cognitive Science Society in 1979, and authored more than 125 articles and 30 books before his death at 76.