Emily M. Bender

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Emily M. Bender
Emily M Bender CHM Mountain View March 2025.jpg
Born1973 (age 51–52)
Known forResearch on the risks of large language models and ethics of NLP; coining the term 'Stochastic parrot'; research on the use of Head-driven phrase structure grammar in computational linguistics
SpouseVijay Menon [1]
Mother Sheila Bender [2]
Academic background
Alma mater UC Berkeley and Stanford University [3] [4]
Thesis Syntactic variation and linguistic competence: The case of AAVE copula absence  (2000 [3] [4] )
Doctoral advisor Tom Wasow
Penelope Eckert [4]
Institutions University of Washington

Emily Menon Bender (born 1973) is an American linguist and professor at the University of Washington where she directs its Computational Linguistics Laboratory. She specializes in computational linguistics and natural language processing. [5] [6]

Contents

She has published several papers on the risks of large language models and on ethics in natural language processing and co-authored the 2025 book The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want. [7] [8]

Education

Bender earned an AB in Linguistics from UC Berkeley in 1995. She received her MA from Stanford University in 1997 and her PhD from Stanford in 2000 for her research on syntactic variation and linguistic competence in African American Vernacular English (AAVE). [9] [3] She was supervised by Tom Wasow and Penelope Eckert. [4]

Career

Before working at University of Washington, Bender held positions at Stanford University, UC Berkeley and worked in industry at YY Technologies. [10] She holds several positions at the University of Washington, 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, [11] and director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory. [12] Bender is the Howard and Frances Nostrand Endowed Professor. [13] [14]

Bender was president of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2024. [15] [16] [17] She was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2022. [18]

Contributions

Bender has published research papers on the linguistic structures of Japanese, Chintang, Mandarin, Wambaya, American Sign Language and English. [19]

Bender has constructed the LinGO Grammar Matrix, an open-source starter kit for the development of broad-coverage precision HPSG grammars. [20] [21] 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.[ citation needed ]

In 2021, Bender presented a paper, "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜" co-authored with Google researcher Timnit Gebru and others at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency [22] 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. [23] The paper concerned ethical issues in building natural language processing systems using machine learning from large text corpora. [24] Since then, she has invested efforts to popularize AI ethics and has taken a stand against hype over large language models. [25] [26]

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". [1]

She draws a distinction between linguistic form versus linguistic meaning. [1] Form refers to the structure of language (e.g. syntax), 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. [27] Therefore, she has argued that tools like ChatGPT have no way to meaningfully understand the text that they process, nor the text that they generate.[ citation needed ]

Selected publications

Books

Articles

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 Weil, Elizabeth (2023-03-01). "You Are Not a Parrot". Intelligencer. Retrieved 2023-09-11.
  2. ↑ "In Conversation with Emily Menon Bender - Sheila Bender's Writing It Real". 2023-09-07. Retrieved 2023-09-11.
  3. 1 2 3 Baković, Eric (2006-10-04). "Language Log: Speaking of missing words in American history". Language Log. Archived from the original on 2023-05-27. Retrieved 2024-02-12.
  4. 1 2 3 4 "Emily M. Bender". OpenReview. Retrieved 2023-09-11.
  5. ↑ "Emily M. Bender | Department of Linguistics | University of Washington". linguistics.washington.edu. Retrieved 2021-11-09.
  6. ↑ "Emily M. Bender". University of Washington faculty website. Retrieved February 4, 2023.
  7. ↑ Bender, Emily M. (2022-06-14). "Human-like programs abuse our empathy – even Google engineers aren't immune". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 2023-02-04.
  8. ↑ Wolverton, Troy (2025-05-06). "AI researchers hope to pierce technology's hype with new book". San Francisco Examiner . ISSN   2574-593X . Retrieved 2025-05-14.
  9. ↑ Bender, Emily. "Emily Bender CV" (PDF).
  10. ↑ "Emily M. Bender". University of Washington. 2021-11-10. Retrieved 2021-11-10.
  11. ↑ "UW Computational Linguistics Master's Degree – Online & Seattle". www.compling.uw.edu. Retrieved 2017-07-19.
  12. ↑ "UW Computational Linguistics Lab".
  13. ↑ Parvi, Joyce (2019-08-21). "Emily M. Bender is awarded Howard and Frances Nostrand Endowed Professorship for 2019–2021". linguistics.washington.edu. Retrieved 2019-12-08.
  14. ↑ "Emily M Bender". The Alan Turing Institute. Retrieved 2021-10-31.
  15. ↑ "ACL 2021 Election Results: Congratulations to Emily M. Bender and Mohit Bansal". 2021-11-09. Retrieved 2021-11-10.
  16. ↑ "About the ACL". 2024. Retrieved 2024-02-23.
  17. ↑ "ACL Officers". 2024-02-05. Retrieved 2024-02-23.
  18. ↑ "2022 AAAS Fellows". American Association for the Advancement of Science. Retrieved 2023-08-03.
  19. ↑ "Emily M. Bender: Publications". University of Washington faculty website. Retrieved 2021-11-18.
  20. ↑ "LinGO Grammar Matrix | Department of Linguistics | University of Washington". linguistics.washington.edu. Retrieved 2017-07-19.
  21. ↑ "An open source grammar development environment and broad-coverage English grammar using HPSG" (PDF). LREC. 2000. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-08-09. Retrieved 2017-07-19.
  22. ↑ Bender, Emily M.; Gebru, Timnit; McMillan-Major, Angelina; Shmitchell, Shmargaret (2021-03-03). "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models be Too Big? 🦜". Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. FAccT '21. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 610–623. doi: 10.1145/3442188.3445922 . ISBN   978-1-4503-8309-7.
  23. ↑ Simonite, Tom. "What Really Happened When Google Ousted Timnit Gebru". Wired. ISSN   1059-1028 . Retrieved 2024-04-02.
  24. ↑ Hao, Karen (December 4, 2020). "We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here's what it says". MIT Technology Review.
  25. ↑ "Inside a Hot-Button Research Paper: Dr. Emily M. Bender Talks Large Language Models and the Future of AI Ethics". Emerging Tech Brew. Retrieved 2022-09-26.
  26. ↑ Bender, Emily M. (2022-05-02). "On NYT Magazine on AI: Resist the Urge to be Impressed". Medium. Retrieved 2022-09-26.
  27. ↑ Bender, Emily M.; Koller, Alexander (2020-07-05). "Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data". Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Online: Association for Computational Linguistics: 5185–5198. doi: 10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.463 . S2CID   211029226.
  28. ↑ "The AI Con". Kirkus Reviews. 16 February 2025. Retrieved 16 February 2025.
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