He was a professor of humanities computing at the University of Groningen until January 2017, when he gave his valedictory address at the celebration of the 30th anniversary of his department there.
He was the director of the Groningen Center of Language and Cognition for fourteen years and supervised over 30 dissertations.
His Ph.D. thesis was completed under the supervision of David Dowty and concerns the syntax and semantics of temporal expressions in German.
Over the last decade, he focused more on creating computational tools for analyzing pronunciation differences, contributing a number of techniques to dialectology.
Nerbonne has served as associate editor of Computational Linguistics[4] and has published there as well as in the international refereed journals Linguistische Berichte; Machine Translation; Linguistics; Linguistics and Philosophy; Künstliche Intelligenz; Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence; Journal of Logic, Language and Information; Traitement Automatique des Language, Language Variation and Change; Dialectologia et Geolinguistica; Taal en Tongval; Computers and the Humanities, and Lecture Notes in Computer Science.