In the summer of 1988 and 1989, he was a visiting scientist at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he co-authored with Ken Church influential papers[2][3] on corpus-based statistical methods in lexical analysis.
In 1991 to 1992, he was joint principal investigator (with Mary-Claire van Leunen) of the HECTOR project at the Systems Research Center of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in Palo Alto, CA.
The HECTOR project was a collaboration between OUP and DEC, and although its results were never published, they served as a basis for the New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998), while the lexicographers working on it were also guinea-pig users in the development of one of the earliest search engines (AltaVista).
In 2003, he was appointed consultant and visiting scientist to the Collocations Project and Electronic Dictionary of the German Language (DWDS) at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (BBAW) headed by Christiane Fellbaum.
Hanks was latterly Professor in Lexicography at the Research Institute of Information and Language Processing (RIILP) in the University of Wolverhampton, where he worked on projects in Corpus Pattern Analysis.