[5] Copestake was educated at the University of Cambridge where she was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in Natural Sciences.
She went on to study at the University of Sussex where she was awarded a PhD in 1992 for research on lexical semantics supervised by Gerald Gazdar.
[6][2] Copestake started doing research in Natural language processing and Computational Linguistics at the University of Cambridge in 1985.
From July 1994 to October 2000 she worked at the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI) at Stanford University, as a Senior Researcher.
[7] According to Google Scholar[1] and Scopus[3] her most cited publications include papers on minimal recursion semantics,[8] multiword expressions,[9] polysemy,[10] named-entity recognition[11] and feature structure grammars.