Ann Copestake

Ann Copestake works in natural language processing and computational linguistics, a branch of artificial intelligence. She began NLP research at Cambridge in 1985, developed the LKB grammar environment, and coauthored work on minimal recursion semantics. Her career took her through Stanford and back to Cambridge, where she became a lecturer in 2000 and led the computer science department from 2018 to 2023. In 2024, she joined an interdisciplinary project on how people describe large language models; the team presented its ideas in a 2025 poster. She is Professor of Computational Linguistics at Cambridge.

Now at: University of Cambridge
Works: 192
Citations: 6,049
h-index: 34
Badges: Loyal

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 18 October 2026.

Timeline

By 1985

From science to language research

After a Natural Sciences degree at Cambridge, she works at Unilever Research for two years and completes the Cambridge Diploma in Computer Science. She starts natural language processing and computational linguistics research at Cambridge in 1985.
1990–1992

A DPhil at Sussex

She studies for a DPhil in Computer Science at the University of Sussex from 1990 to 1992.
1993–2000

The LKB and Stanford

In 1993, she publishes The Compleat LKB, a Cambridge technical report on the Lexical Knowledge Base system. She develops LKB as a free grammar and lexicon environment. She visits Xerox PARC in 1993–1994, works on Stuttgart's Verbmobil project in 1994–1995, and serves as a Senior Researcher at Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information from July 1994 to October 2000.
1995–2005

Minimal recursion semantics

She coauthors Translation using Minimal Recursion Semantics in 1995. In 2005, she coauthors Minimal Recursion Semantics: An Introduction with Dan Flickinger, Ivan Sag, and Carl Pollard.
2000–2023

Cambridge department leadership

She becomes a University Lecturer at Cambridge in October 2000. She leads the Department of Computer Science and Technology from May 2018 to September 2023.
2024–2025

Explaining large language models

In April 2024, she joins an interdisciplinary project, Exploring novel figurative language to conceptualise Large Language Models, with four colleagues. In December 2025, she and the team present a poster that argues for using NLP history to frame LLM technology.
As of October 2026

Professor of computational linguistics

She is Professor of Computational Linguistics at the University of Cambridge in 2025 and as of October 2026. Her research focuses on natural language processing and computational linguistics, a branch of artificial intelligence.