Ann Copestake

Professor Ann Copestake

BA MA DipCompSci DPhil

Ann is Professor of Computational Linguistics in the Department of Computer Science & Technology. Her research area is computational linguistics and Natural Language Processing, a branch of Artificial Intelligence.

Ann Copestake

After getting a degree in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge, Ann worked for Unilever Research for two years and then did the Diploma in Computer Science at Cambridge. She started doing research in Natural Language Processing/Computational Linguistics at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory (now the Department of Computer Science & Technology) in 1985.

She worked for ten years as a Research Associate on a series of projects while also doing a DPhil in Computer Science at the University of Sussex (1990-1992), visiting Xerox PARC (1993-1994), and working on the Verbmobil project for the University of Stuttgart (1994-1995). From July 1994 to October 2000 she was at the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford University, as a Senior Researcher. She became a University Lecturer at Cambridge in October 2000 and is now Professor of Computational Linguistics. She was Head of Department from 1 May 2018 to September 2023.

Research interests

Ann’s research area is computational linguistics and Natural Language Processing, which is a branch of Artificial Intelligence. Her work involves the development of formal computer models of human languages (or, more precisely, models of some aspects of human languages), rather than being guided by any particular application, although her work has been used in real-world contexts.  Her current focus is on the use of interdisciplinary approaches to better understand recent developments in AI, especially Large Language Models (LLMs).

In conjunction with DELPH-IN, an informal international consortium, Ann has developed software that has been used to develop formal computational accounts of the syntax and compositional semantics of many different languages. Much of her own research has concerned the development of models of semantics that are compatible with broad-coverage computational processing (parsing and generation) and with distributional semantics.    

One recent project was Giving Voice to Digital Democracies, part of the Centre for Humanities and Social Change. Currently, Ann has an interdisciplinary pilot project, `Exploring novel figurative language to conceptualise Large Language Models’ which is funded by the Cambridge Language Sciences Incubator Fund.

Ann was Head of the Department of Computer Science and Technology from May 2018 to September 2023, an exciting, challenging and complex role.