Bonnie Lynn Nash-Webber (born August 30, 1946)[2] 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]

Education and career

Webber completed her PhD at Harvard University in 1978, advised by Bill Woods,[1] 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.[1] 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.

References

  1. ^ a b c d Bonnie Webber at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. ^ a b Bonnie Webber at Library of Congress
  3. ^ Bonnie Webber publications indexed by Google Scholar Edit this at Wikidata
  4. ^ a b Honorary Staff, University of Edinburgh School of Informatics, 24 April 2015, retrieved 2020-03-12
  5. ^ a b c "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. ^ a b c d 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, 59 (1), Cambridge University Press: 214–215, doi:10.2307/414072, JSTOR 414072
  10. ^ Morgan Kaufmann, 1981 [ISBN missing]
  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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