Woods built one of the first natural language question answering systems (LUNAR) to answer questions about the Apollo 11 Moon rocks for the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center while he was at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN)[3] in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He was the principal investigator for BBN's early work in natural language processing and knowledge representation and for its first project in continuous speech understanding.

Subsequently, he was chief scientist for Applied Expert Systems and Principal Technologist for ON Technology, Cambridge start-ups.

Woods' 1975 paper "What's in a Link"[11] is a widely cited[12] critical review of early work in semantic networks.

This paper has been cited in the context of querying and natural language processing approaches that make use of Semantic Networks and general knowledge modeling.