Ronald M. Kaplan (born 1946) has served as a Vice President at Amazon.com and Chief Scientist for Amazon Search (A9.com). He was previously Vice President and Distinguished Scientist at Nuance Communications and director of Nuance' Natural Language and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Prior to that he served as Chief Scientist and a Principal Researcher at the Powerset division of Microsoft Bing. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Linguistics Department at Stanford University and a Principal of Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI). He was previously a Research Fellow at the Palo Alto Research Center (formerly the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center), where he was the manager of research in Natural Language Theory and Technology.