Bonnie Webber
Bonnie Lynn Nash-Webber 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.
Education and career
Webber completed her PhD at Harvard University in 1978, advised by Bill Woods, while at the same time working with Woods at Bolt Beranek and Newman.Career and research
Webber was appointed a professor at the University of Pennsylvania for 20 years before moving to Edinburgh in 1998. She has many academic descendants through her student at Pennsylvania, Martha E. Pollack. After retiring from the University of Edinburgh in 2016, she was listed by the university as an honorary professor.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. With Norman Badler and Cary Phillips, Webber is a co-author of the book Simulating Humans: Computer Graphics Animation and Control.With Aravind Joshi and Ivan Sag she is a co-editor of Elements of Discourse Understanding, with Nils Nilsson she is co-editor of Readings in Artificial Intelligence, and with Barbara Grosz and Karen Spärck Jones she is co-editor of Readings in Natural Language Processing.