Bonnie Webber

Webber completed her PhD at Harvard University in 1978, advised by Bill Woods,^[2] while at the same time working with Woods at Bolt Beranek and Newman.^[5]

Webber was appointed a professor at the University of Pennsylvania for 20 years before moving to Edinburgh in 1998.^[6][5] She has many academic descendants through her student at Pennsylvania, Martha E. Pollack.^[2] After retiring from the University of Edinburgh in 2016,^[6][5] she was listed by the university as an honorary professor.^[4]

Webber's doctoral dissertation, A Formal Approach to Discourse Anaphora, used formal logic to model the meanings of natural-language statements; it was published by Garland Publishers in 1979 in their Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics Series.^[7] With Norman Badler and Cary Phillips, Webber is a co-author of the book Simulating Humans: Computer Graphics Animation and Control (Oxford University Press, 1993).^[8]

With Aravind Joshi and Ivan Sag she is a co-editor of Elements of Discourse Understanding,^[9] with Nils Nilsson she is co-editor of Readings in Artificial Intelligence,^[10] and with Barbara Grosz and Karen Spärck Jones she is co-editor of Readings in Natural Language Processing.^[11]

Webber was appointed a Founding Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in 1990,^[6][12] and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) in 2004.^[13] She served as president of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 1980,^[6][14] and became a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2012, "for significant contributions to discourse structure and discourse-based interpretation".^[15] In 2020, she was awarded the Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award.