Bonnie Webber
Computational linguist
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bonnie Lynn Nash-Webber (born August 30, 1946)[1] is a computational linguist.[3] She is an honorary professor of intelligent systems in the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation (ILCC) at the University of Edinburgh.[4]
August 30, 1946[1]
Bonnie Webber | |
|---|---|
| Born | Bonnie Lynn Webber August 30, 1946[1] |
| Alma mater | Harvard University (PhD) |
| Known for | Computational Linguistics |
| Awards | AAAI Fellow (1990) |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | University of Edinburgh University of Pennsylvania BBN Technologies |
| Thesis | A Formal Approach to Discourse Anaphora (1978) |
| Doctoral advisor | William Aaron Woods[2] |
| Doctoral students | Martha E. Pollack[2] |
| Website | homepages |
Education and career
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]
Career and research
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]
Publications
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]
Awards and honours
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.