Professor, Computer and Information Science.
Natural-language processing, medical informatics, artificial intelligence.
Background: Bonnie Lynn Webber was a senior scientist at Bolt, Beranek
and Newman Inc. (Cambridge MA) from 1972-1978, receiving her Ph.D. from Harvard
University in 1978. Her thesis was entitled ``A Formal Approach to Discourse
Anaphora''. She has been on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania
since 1978, with a spring 1988 sabbatical at Stanford University Medical
School, as a Visiting Associate Professor in Medical Informatics.
Research statement:
My primary research interests lie in two areas: (1) natural-language
processing and (2) medical applications of artificial intelligence and
human-computer interface research. These interests are linked by the
importance to both of reasoning and communicating about human actions.
Selected publications related to
TraumAID:
Gertner, A., Webber, B.L. and Clarke, J.R. Upholding the Maxim of Relevance during Patient-Centered Activities
Proc. 4th Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing,
Stuttgart, Germany, October 1994.
Gertner, A. and Webber, B.L. Reasoning about plans for effective
communication of decision support. in Proc. AAAI Spring Symposium
on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine: Applications of Current
Technologies Stanford, CA. March 1996.
Gertner, A., Webber, B.L. and Clarke, J.R.
On-Line Quality
Assurance in the Initial Definitive Management of Multiple Trauma:
Evaluating System Potential. To appear in Artificial Intelligence
in Medicine Journal.
Gertner, A. and Webber, B.L.
A Bias
towards Relevance:Recognizing plans where goal minimization fails.
To appear in Proceedings of the 13th National
Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Portland, OR. August 1996.
Clarke, J.R., Webber, B.L., Gertner, A., Kaye, J., Rymon, R.,
On-line Decision Support for Emergency Trauma Management.
Electronic poster session for the Eighteenth Symposium on Computer
Applications for Medical Care (SCAMC-94), November, 1994, p.1028.
Webber, B.L., Carberry, S., Clarke, J.R., Gertner, A., Harvey, T.,
Rymon, R., Washington, R.,
Providing Decision Support in Multiple Trauma Management:
Recognizing Multiple Goals, Adopting Multiple Intentions. Accepted
for publication, Artificial Intelligence.
Selected publications related to Natural Language Processing:
Webber, B.L.
Structure and Ostension in the Interpretation of Discourse Deixis.
Natural Language and Cognitive Processes 6(2), January 1991,
pp. 107-135.
Webber, B.L. and Di Eugenio, B. Free Adjuncts in Natural
Language Instructions, Proceedings COLING-90,
Helsinki, Finland, August 1990.
Webber, B.L. , Do Nothing 'Till You Hear from Me: Language and Perception.
Do Nothing 'Till You Hear from Me: Language and
Perception.
1995 AAAI Fall Symposium on Embodied Language and Action,
Cambridge MA, November 1995.
Webber, B. Instructing Animated Agents: Viewing Langauge in Behavioral
Terms.
Instructing Animated Agents.
Proc. International Conference on Cooperative Multi-modal
Communication, Eindhoven, Netherlands, May 1995.
Di Eugenio, B. and Webber, B.L.
Pragmatic
Overloading in Natural Language Instructions.
International Journal of Expert Systems, 1996.
Cristea, D. and Webber, B.L.
Expectations in Incremental Discourse Processing.
Proc. 35th Annual Meeting of the Association for Comptutational
Linguistics, Madrid, July 1997.
Webber, B.L. and Joshi, A.K.
Anchoring a Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar for Discourse.
ACL/COLING Workshop on Discourse Relations and Discourse
Markers, Montreal, Canada, 15 August 1998.
Stone, M. and Webber, B.L.
Textual Economy through Close Coupling of Syntax and Semantics.
International Workshop on Natural Language Generation,
Niagara-on-the-Lake, Canada, August 1998.
Publications related to both Language Processing and Medical
Informatics:
Cawsey, A., Webber, B.L. and Jones, R.
Natural Language Generation in Healthcare .
To appear in Journal of the American Medical Informatics
Association , 1998.