Bonnie Webber

Bonnie Lynn Nash-Webber FRSE (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]

Bonnie Webber

FRSE
Born
Bonnie Lynn Webber

(1946-08-30) August 30, 1946[1]
Alma materHarvard University (PhD)
AwardsAAAI Fellow (1991)
Scientific career
InstitutionsUniversity of Edinburgh
University of Pennsylvania
BBN Technologies
ThesisA Formal Approach to Discourse Anaphora (1978)
Doctoral advisorWilliam Aaron Woods[2]
Doctoral studentsMartha E. Pollack[2]
Websitehomepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/bonnie

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 Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in 1991,[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.

References
  1. Bonnie Webber at Library of Congress Authorities
  2. Bonnie Webber at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. Bonnie Webber publications indexed by Google Scholar
  4. Honorary Staff, University of Edinburgh School of Informatics, retrieved 2020-03-12
  5. "Special minute: Professor Bonnie Webber, BSc, PhD, FRSE Emeritus, Professor of Intelligent Systems" (PDF), Academic Senate Agenda, University of Edinburgh, pp. 14–15, 28 September 2016
  6. Speaker biography: Bonnie Webber, Macquarie University, August 2018, retrieved 2020-03-12
  7. Hirst, Graeme (1981), "Discourse-oriented anaphora resolution in natural language understanding: a review" (PDF), Computational Linguistics, 7 (2): 85–98
  8. Marks, Joe (1994), "Review of Simulating Humans", ACM SIGART Bulletin, 5 (3): 45–46, doi:10.1145/181911.1064917, S2CID 15893055
  9. MacWhinney, Brian (1983), "Review of Elements of Discourse Understanding", Language, Cambridge University Press, 59 (1): 214–215, doi:10.2307/414072, JSTOR 414072
  10. Morgan Kaufmann, 1981
  11. White, John S. (1987), "Review of Readings in Natural Language Processing", Computers and Translation, 2 (4): 285–286, JSTOR 25469930
  12. Lee, John A. N. (1995), International Biographical Dictionary of Computer Pioneers, Taylor & Francis, p. 798, ISBN 9781884964473
  13. Professor Bonnie Lynn Webber FRSE, Royal Society of Edinburgh, retrieved 2020-03-12
  14. "ACL Officers", ACL Wiki, Association for Computational Linguistics, retrieved 2020-03-12
  15. "ACL Fellows", ACL Wiki, Association for Computational Linguistics, retrieved 2020-03-12


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