Biography:Emily M. Bender

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Short description: American linguist
Emily M. Bender
Born1973 (age 52–53)
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
Spouse(s)Vijay Menon[1]
Academic background
Alma materUC Berkeley and Stanford University[2][3]
ThesisSyntactic variation and linguistic competence: The case of AAVE copula absence (2000[2][3])
Doctoral advisorTom Wasow
Penelope Eckert[3]
Academic work
DisciplineLinguistics
Sub-discipline
  • Syntax
  • Computational Linguistics
InstitutionsUniversity 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]

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][2] She was supervised by Tom Wasow and Penelope Eckert.[3]

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

  • Bender, Emily M. (2000). Syntactic Variation and Linguistic Competence: The Case of AAVE Copula Absence. Stanford University. ISBN 978-0493085425. 
  • Sag, Ivan; Wasow, Thomas; Bender, Emily M. (2003). Syntactic theory: A formal introduction. Center for the Study of Language and Information. ISBN 978-1575864006. 
  • Bender, Emily M. (2013). Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing: 100 Essentials from Morphology and Syntax. Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies. Springer. ISBN 978-3031010224. 
  • Bender, Emily M.; Lascarides, Alex (2019). Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing II: 100 Essentials from Semantics and Pragmatics. Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies. Springer. ISBN 978-3031010446. 
  • Bender, Emily M.; Hanna, Alex (2025). The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want. Harper. ISBN 9780063418561. [28]

Articles

  • Bender, Emily (2000). "The Syntax of Mandarin BΔƒ: Reconsidering the Verbal Analysis". Journal of East Asian Linguistics 9 (2): 105–145. doi:10.1023/A:1008348224800. https://www.academia.edu/1889158. 
  • Bender, Emily M.; Flickinger, Dan; Oepen, Stephan (2002). "The Grammar Matrix: An open-source starter-kit for the rapid development of cross-linguistically consistent broad-coverage precision grammars". 15. 
  • Siegel, Melanie; Bender, Emily M. (2002). "Efficient deep processing of Japanese". 12. 
  • Goodman, M. W.; Crowgey, J.; Xia, F; Bender, E. M. (2015). "Xigt: Extensible interlinear glossed text for natural language processing". Lang Resources & Evaluation 49 (2): 455–485. doi:10.1007/s10579-014-9276-1. 
  • Xia, Fei; Lewis, William D.; Goodman, Michael Wayne; Slayden, Glenn; Georgi, Ryan; Crowgey, Joshua; Bender, Emily M. (2016). "Enriching A Massively Multilingual database of interlinear glossed text". Lang Resources & Evaluation 50 (2): 321–349. doi:10.1007/s10579-015-9325-4. 
  • Bender, Emily M.; Gebru, Timnit; McMillan-Major and, Angelina; Shmitchell, Shmargaret (2021). "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜". FAccT '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. doi:10.1145/3442188.3445922. 

See also

  • Michael Brame
  • Ellen Kaisse

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Weil, Elizabeth (2023-03-01). "You Are Not a Parrot" (in en-us). https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 BakoviΔ‡, Eric (2006-10-04). "Language Log: Speaking of missing words in American history". http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003638.html. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 "Emily M. Bender" (in en). https://openreview.net/profile?id=~Emily_M._Bender1. 
  4. ↑ "In Conversation with Emily Menon Bender - Sheila Bender's Writing It Real" (in en-US). 2023-09-07. https://writingitreal.com/audio-folder/conversation-emily-menon-bender/. 
  5. ↑ "Emily M. Bender | Department of Linguistics | University of Washington". https://linguistics.washington.edu/people/emily-m-bender. 
  6. ↑ "Emily M. Bender". https://faculty.washington.edu/ebender/. 
  7. ↑ Bender, Emily M. (2022-06-14). "Human-like programs abuse our empathy – even Google engineers aren't immune" (in en-GB). The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/14/human-like-programs-abuse-our-empathy-even-google-engineers-arent-immune. 
  8. ↑ Wolverton, Troy (2025-05-06). "AI researchers hope to pierce technology’s hype with new book" (in en-US). San Francisco Examiner. ISSN 2574-593X. https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/technology/the-ai-con-book-aims-to-pierce-artificial-intelligence-hype/article_dae92bab-6e68-4ba8-9b52-76b640f1d48d.html. 
  9. ↑ Bender, Emily. "Emily Bender CV". https://faculty.washington.edu/ebender/EmilyMBender_CV.pdf. 
  10. ↑ "Emily M. Bender". 2021-11-10. https://linguistics.washington.edu/people/emily-m-bender. 
  11. ↑ "UW Computational Linguistics Master's Degree – Online & Seattle" (in en). http://www.compling.uw.edu/. 
  12. ↑ "UW Computational Linguistics Lab". http://depts.washington.edu/uwcl/twiki/bin/view.cgi/Main/WebHome. 
  13. ↑ Parvi, Joyce (2019-08-21). "Emily M. Bender is awarded Howard and Frances Nostrand Endowed Professorship for 2019–2021" (in en). https://linguistics.washington.edu/news/2019/08/21/emily-m-bender-awarded-howard-and-frances-nostrand-endowed-professorship-2019-2021. 
  14. ↑ "Emily M Bender" (in en). https://www.turing.ac.uk/people/guest-speakers/emily-m-bender. 
  15. ↑ "ACL 2021 Election Results: Congratulations to Emily M. Bender and Mohit Bansal" (in en). 2021-11-09. https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/acl-2021-election-results-congratulations-emily-m-bender-and-mohit-bansal. 
  16. ↑ "About the ACL" (in en). 2024. https://www.aclweb.org/portal/about. 
  17. ↑ "ACL Officers" (in en). 2024-02-05. https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Officers. 
  18. ↑ "2022 AAAS Fellows" (in en). https://www.aaas.org/page/2022-fellows-0. 
  19. ↑ "Emily M. Bender: Publications". https://faculty.washington.edu/ebender/publications/. 
  20. ↑ "LinGO Grammar Matrix | Department of Linguistics | University of Washington" (in en). https://linguistics.washington.edu/research/projects-and-grants/lingo-grammar-matrix. 
  21. ↑ "An open source grammar development environment and broad-coverage English grammar using HPSG". LREC. 2000. http://ccl.pku.edu.cn/douBTfire/Syntax/HPSG/EnglishGrammar_HPSG.pdf. 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" (in en-US). Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. https://www.wired.com/story/google-timnit-gebru-ai-what-really-happened/. 
  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. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru. 
  25. ↑ "Inside a Hot-Button Research Paper: Dr. Emily M. Bender Talks Large Language Models and the Future of AI Ethics" (in en-us). https://www.emergingtechbrew.com/stories/2021/02/01/inside-hotbutton-research-paper-dr-emily-m-bender-talks-large-language-models-future-ai-ethics. 
  26. ↑ Bender, Emily M. (2022-05-02). "On NYT Magazine on AI: Resist the Urge to be Impressed" (in en). https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/on-nyt-magazine-on-ai-resist-the-urge-to-be-impressed-3d92fd9a0edd. 
  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. https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.463. 
  28. ↑ "The AI Con" (in en). 16 February 2025. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/emily-m-bender/the-ai-con/. 



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