Emily M. Bender (born 1973) is an American linguist who is a professor at the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...

. She specializes in

computational linguistics Computational linguistics is an Interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, comput ...

and

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...

. She is also the director of the University of Washington's Computational Linguistics Laboratory. She has published several papers on the risks of

large language model A large language model (LLM) is a language model consisting of a neural network with many parameters (typically billions of weights or more), trained on large quantities of unlabelled text using self-supervised learning. LLMs emerged around 2018 an ...

Education

Bender earned an AB in Linguistics from

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...

in 1995. She received her MA from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

in 1997 and her PhD from Stanford in 2000 for her research on syntactic variation and linguistic competence in

African American Vernacular English (AAVE) African-American Vernacular English (AAVE, ), also referred to as Black (Vernacular) English, Black English Vernacular, or occasionally Ebonics (a colloquial, controversial term), is the variety of English natively spoken, particularly in urban ...

Career

Before working at University of Washington, Bender held positions at Stanford University, UC Berkeley and worked in industry at YY Technologies. She currently holds several positions at the

, where she has been faculty since 2003, including professor in the Department of Linguistics, adjunct professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, faculty director of the Master of Science in Computational Linguistics, and director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory. Bender is the current holder of the Howard and Frances Nostrand Endowed Professorship. Bender was elected VP-elect of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2021. Bender will serve as VP-elect in 2022, moving to Vice-President in 2023, President in 2024, and Past President in 2025.

Contributions

Bender has published research papers on the linguistic structures of Japanese, Chintang,

Mandarin Mandarin or The Mandarin may refer to: Language * Mandarin Chinese, branch of Chinese originally spoken in northern parts of the country ** Standard Chinese or Modern Standard Mandarin, the official language of China ** Taiwanese Mandarin, Stand ...

, Wambaya,

American Sign Language American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States of America and most of Anglophone Canadians, Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual lang ...

and English. Bender has constructed the LinGO Grammar Matrix, an open-source starter kit for the development of broad-coverage precision HPSG grammars. In 2013, she published ''Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing: 100 Essentials from Morphology and Syntax,'' and in 2019, she published ''Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing II: 100 Essentials from Semantics and Pragmatics'' with Alex Lascarides, which both explain basic linguistic principles in a way that makes them accessible to NLP practitioners. In 2021, Bender presented a paper, " On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?" co-authored with

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

researcher Timnit Gebru and others at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency that Google tried to block from publication, part of a sequence of events leading to Gebru departing from Google, the details of which are disputed. The paper concerned

ethical issues Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that "involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior".''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' The field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concerns ma ...

in building natural language processing systems using

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

from large

text corpora In linguistics, a corpus (plural ''corpora'') or text corpus is a language resource consisting of a large and structured set of texts (nowadays usually electronically stored and processed). In corpus linguistics, they are used to do statistical ...

. Since then, she has invested efforts to popularize AI ethics and has taken a stand against hype over

large language models A large language model (LLM) is a language model consisting of a neural network with many parameters (typically billions of weights or more), trained on large quantities of unlabelled text using self-supervised learning. LLMs emerged around 2018 an ...

. The ''Bender Rule'', which originated from the question Bender repeatedly asked at the research talks, is research advice for computational scholars to "always name the language you're working with". She draws a distinction between linguistic form versus linguistic meaning. Form refers to the structure of language (e.g.

syntax In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency) ...

), whereas meaning refers to the ideas that language represents. In a 2020 paper, she argued that machine learning models for natural language processing which are trained only on form, without connection to meaning, cannot meaningfully understand language. Therefore, she has argued that tools like

ChatGPT ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022. It is built on top of OpenAI's GPT-3 family of large language models, and is fine-tuned (an approach to transfer learning) with both supervised and ...

have no way to meaningfully understand the text that they process, nor the text that they generate.

Selected publications

Books

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Articles

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References

External links

Personal page at University of Washington

Faculty page at University of WashingtonArticle by Emily Bender in The Linguist List's Famous Linguists series
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bender, Emily M. 1973 births Living people 20th-century linguists 21st-century linguists Linguists from the United States Scientists from Seattle Stanford University alumni University of Washington faculty Women linguists