Christopher D. Manning

Christopher David Manning (born September 18, 1965) is a computer scientist and applied linguist whose research in the areas of natural language processing, artificial intelligence and machine learning is considered highly influential. He is the current Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL).

Manning is best known for co-developing GloVe word vectors and the bilinear or multiplicative form of attention in artificial neural networks and for his books Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing (1999) and Introduction to Information Retrieval (2008). He is the Thomas M. Siebel Professor in Machine Learning and a professor of Linguistics and Computer Science at Stanford University. He was previously President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2015) and he has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Amsterdam (2023).

Manning received a BA (Hons) degree majoring in mathematics, computer science, and linguistics from the Australian National University (1989) and a PhD in linguistics from Stanford (1994), under the guidance of Joan Bresnan. He was an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University (1994–96) and a lecturer at the University of Sydney (1996–99) before returning to Stanford as an assistant professor. At Stanford, he was promoted to associate professor in 2006 and to full professor in 2012. He was elected an AAAI Fellow in 2010.

Manning's linguistic work includes his dissertation Ergativity: Argument Structure and Grammatical Relations (1996), a monograph Complex Predicates and Information Spreading in LFG (1999), and his work developing Universal Dependencies, from which he is the namesake of Manning's Law. He has also led development of open source computational linguistics software including CoreNLP, Stanza, and GloVe.

Manning's PhD students include Dan Klein, Richard Socher, and Sepandar Kamvar. In 2021, he joined AIX Ventures as an Investment Partner. AIX Ventures is a venture capital fund that invests in artificial intelligence startups.