Jerry R. Hobbs (born January 25, 1942) is an American researcher in the fields of computational linguistics, discourse analysis, and artificial intelligence.
He has written numerous papers in the areas of parsing, syntax, semantic interpretation, information extraction, knowledge representation, encoding commonsense knowledge, discourse analysis, the structure of conversation, and the Semantic Web.
He led SRI's text-understanding research, and directed the development of the abduction-based TACITUS system for text understanding, and the FASTUS system for rapid extraction of information from text based on finite-state automata.
In September 2002 he took a position as senior computer scientist and research professor at the Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California.
He has been a consulting professor with the Linguistics Department and the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford University.