Bonnie Webber

Last updated

Bonnie Webber
FRSE
Born
Bonnie Lynn Webber

(1946-08-30) August 30, 1946 (age 78) [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.inf.ed.ac.uk/bonnie OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

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]

Contents

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.

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References

  1. 1 2 Bonnie Webber at Library of Congress
  2. 1 2 3 4 Bonnie Webber at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. ↑ Bonnie Webber publications indexed by Google Scholar OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
  4. 1 2 Honorary Staff, University of Edinburgh School of Informatics, 24 April 2015, retrieved 2020-03-12
  5. 1 2 3 "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. 1 2 3 4 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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