Bonnie Webber

Bonnie Lynn Nash-Webber FRSE (born August 30, 1946)[1] is a computational linguist. She is an honorary professor of intelligent systems in the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation at the University of Edinburgh.[2]

Education and career

Webber completed a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1978, advised by Bill Woods,[3] while at the same time working with Woods at Bolt Beranek and Newman.[4] She then became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania for 20 years before moving to Edinburgh in 1998.[5][4] She has many academic descendants through her student at Pennsylvania, Martha E. Pollack.[3] After retiring from the University of Edinburgh in 2016,[5][4] she was listed by the university as an honorary professor.[2]

Books

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.[6] 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).[7]

With Aravind Joshi and Ivan Sag she is a co-editor of Elements of Discourse Understanding (Cambridge University Press, 1981),[8] with Nils Nilsson she is co-editor of Readings in Artificial Intelligence (Morgan Kaufmann, 1981), and with Barbara Grosz and Karen Spärck Jones she is co-editor of Readings in Natural Language Processing (1986).[9]

Recognition

Webber became a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 1991,[5][10] and was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2004.[11] She was president of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1980,[5][12] and became a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2012, "for significant contributions to discourse structure and discourse-based interpretation".[13]

References
  1. Birth year from Library of Congress catalog entry, accessed 2020-03-12
  2. Honorary Staff, University of Edinburgh School of Informatics, retrieved 2020-03-12
  3. Bonnie Webber at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. "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
  5. Speaker biography: Bonnie Webber, Macquarie University, August 2018, retrieved 2020-03-12
  6. Hirst, Graeme (April 1981), "Discourse-oriented anaphora resolution in natural language understanding: a review" (PDF), Computational Linguistics, 7 (2): 85–98
  7. Marks, Joe (July 1994), "Review of Simulating Humans", ACM SIGART Bulletin, 5 (3): 45–46, doi:10.1145/181911.1064917
  8. MacWhinney, Brian (March 1983), "Review of Elements of Discourse Understanding", Language, 59 (1): 214–215, doi:10.2307/414072, JSTOR 414072
  9. White, John S. (October 1987), "Review of Readings in Natural Language Processing", Computers and Translation, 2 (4): 285–286, JSTOR 25469930
  10. Lee, John A. N. (1995), International Biographical Dictionary of Computer Pioneers, Taylor & Francis, p. 798, ISBN 9781884964473
  11. Professor Bonnie Lynn Webber FRSE, Royal Society of Edinburgh, retrieved 2020-03-12
  12. "ACL Officers", ACL Wiki, Association for Computational Linguistics, retrieved 2020-03-12
  13. "ACL Fellows", ACL Wiki, Association for Computational Linguistics, retrieved 2020-03-12
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