Biography:Bonnie Webber

From HandWiki
Bonnie Webber

FRSE
Born
Bonnie Lynn Webber

(1946-08-30) August 30, 1946 (age 80)[1]
EducationHarvard University (PhD)
Known forComputational Linguistics
AwardsAAAI Fellow (1990)
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]
Website{{{1}}}

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]

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] During her time at the University of Edinburgh, she co-authored more than 40 academic papers.[7] 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.[8] 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).[9]

With Aravind Joshi and Ivan Sag she is a co-editor of Elements of Discourse Understanding,[10] with Nils Nilsson she is co-editor of Readings in Artificial Intelligence,[11] and with Barbara Grosz and Karen Spärck Jones she is co-editor of Readings in Natural Language Processing.[12]

Awards and honours

Webber was appointed a Founding Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in 1990,[6][13] and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) in 2004.[14] She served as president of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 1980,[6][15] and became a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2012, "for significant contributions to discourse structure and discourse-based interpretation".[16] In 2020, she was awarded the Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Bonnie Webber at Library of Congress Authorities
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Bonnie Webber at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. ↑ {{Google Scholar id}} template missing ID and not present in Wikidata.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Honorary Staff, University of Edinburgh School of Informatics, 24 April 2015, https://www.ed.ac.uk/informatics/people/honorary, retrieved 2020-03-12 
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 "Special minute: Professor Bonnie Webber, BSc, PhD, FRSE Emeritus, Professor of Intelligent Systems", Academic Senate Agenda (University of Edinburgh): pp. 14–15, 28 September 2016, https://www.ed.ac.uk/files/atoms/files/20160928agendaandpapers.pdf 
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Speaker biography: Bonnie Webber, Macquarie University, August 2018, https://www.mq.edu.au/research/research-centres-groups-and-facilities/healthy-people/centres/centre-for-language-sciences-clas/news-and-events/prof-bonnie-webber-seminar, retrieved 2020-03-12 
  7. ↑ "Bonnie Lynn Webber, Professor of Intelligent Systems, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh". https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/bonnie/bonnie.html. 
  8. ↑ Hirst, Graeme (1981), "Discourse-oriented anaphora resolution in natural language understanding: a review", Computational Linguistics 7 (2): 85–98, https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/J81-2001.pdf 
  9. ↑ Marks, Joe (1994), "Review of Simulating Humans", ACM SIGART Bulletin 5 (3): 45–46, doi:10.1145/181911.1064917 
  10. ↑ MacWhinney, Brian (1983), "Review of Elements of Discourse Understanding", Language (Cambridge University Press) 59 (1): 214–215, doi:10.2307/414072 
  11. ↑ Morgan Kaufmann, 1981, 978-0-934613-03-3
  12. ↑ White, John S. (1987), "Review of Readings in Natural Language Processing", Computers and Translation 2 (4): 285–286 
  13. ↑ Lee, John A. N. (1995), International Biographical Dictionary of Computer Pioneers, Taylor & Francis, p. 798, ISBN 9781884964473, https://books.google.com/books?id=ocx4Jc12mkgC&pg=PA798 
  14. ↑ Professor Bonnie Lynn Webber FRSE, Royal Society of Edinburgh, https://www.rse.org.uk/fellow/bonnie-webber/, retrieved 2020-03-12 
  15. ↑ "ACL Officers", ACL Wiki (Association for Computational Linguistics), https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Officers, retrieved 2020-03-12 
  16. ↑ "ACL Fellows", ACL Wiki (Association for Computational Linguistics), https://aclweb.org/aclwiki/ACL_Fellows, retrieved 2020-03-12 



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