Ann Copestake
Professor of Computational Linguistics
Head of Department
Department of Computer Science and Technology ("Computer Lab")
University of Cambridge
William Gates Building,
15 JJ Thomson Avenue
Cambridge CB3 0FD, UK
PA: (+44)
work: (+44) 1223 334615,
fax: (+44) 1223 334678
email: firstname.lastname @cl.cam.ac.uk
Research Group
Natural Language group home page (incl. local resources info.)
Cambridge Language Sciences
I am co-Director of
Cambridge Language Sciences which is
a (virtual) Interdisciplinary Research Centre.
Contacting me
Email is best: I hope everyone can work out my email from the information
above. But you may find it more effective to contact my
Personal Assistant
for any Departmental or University business.
Prospective students, interns
and so on contacting me for the first time,
please read this
page about emailing me first.
Research overview
My research is in Natural Language Processing (NLP) / Computational
Linguistics (a branch of AI), mostly in formal representation issues,
compositional and lexical semantics
and natural language generation.
I am also the original
developer of the LKB system
which is a freely available grammar and lexicon development environment
for constraint-based frameworks including HPSG.
I've worked on a variety of application areas including scientific
text processing,
information extraction, augmentative
and alternative communication (AAC), machine translation,
Natural Language Interfaces, lexical acquisition
and on tools for lexicographers.
I am generally interested in applications involving
broad coverage text processing.
Some details on ongoing work are available from the
project web pages.
See also current research directions.
Projects
See the list of projects
for details of funded projects for which I have been PI at Cambridge (out-of-date).
The larger projects have their own web pages.
I have a long-term involvement
in DELPH-IN.
This is not a conventional
funded project but
a loosely structured consortium of researchers developing open source grammars
and technology for linguistically-motivated NLP. Essentially a
generalised or internationalised version of
LinGO Linguistic Grammars Online.
My main involvement is with the development of semantic representations
(MRS/RMRS/DMRS) and in the LKB grammar development environment.
We use DELPH-IN technology in all the funded projects.
Research students (with thesis title if completed)
Publications
See my Google Scholar profile. I no longer actively maintain
my publications list but keep it available for downloadable versions of older papers
and reports.
List of slides from presentations.
This also contains links to material
from courses at summer schools etc.
LKB system links
CSLI studies in Computational Linguistics
I am series editor for
CSLI Studies
in Computational Linguistics. Please see
my CSLI series page for a little
more information.
FoLLI
I was president of
FoLLI - The Association for Logic, Language and Information
from 2012 to 2016: I am still on the FoLLI board.
Short Biography
After getting a degree in Natural Sciences from Cambridge
(mostly Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry),
I worked for Unilever Research for two years, and
then did the Diploma in Computer Science at Cambridge. I started
doing research in
Natural Language Processing/Computational Linguistics
at the
University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory
in 1985. I worked for ten years on a
series of projects, including
ACQUILEX. During that time
I also did a PhD in
Computer Science at the University of Sussex
(1990-1992),
was a visitor at
Xerox PARC (1993/4) and
worked on the Verbmobil project
for the University of Stuttgart (1994/5). From July 1994 to October 2000
I was at
CSLI, Stanford University,
as a Senior Researcher.
I became a University Lecturer at Cambridge in October 2000
and am now a Professor. I became Head of Department on May 1 2018.
Ann Copestake
Created: February 2, 2001