Emily M. Bender

Emily Menon Bender (born 1973) is an American linguist who is a professor at the University of Washington. She specializes in computational linguistics and natural language processing. 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 models and on ethics in natural language processing.

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). She was supervised by Tom Wasow and Penelope Eckert.

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 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, 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 served as VP-elect in 2022, moving to Vice-President in 2023. She is serving as President through 2024, and will serve as Past President in 2025. Bender was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2022.

Contributions
Bender has published research papers on the linguistic structures of Japanese, Chintang, Mandarin, Wambaya, American Sign Language 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 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 in building natural language processing systems using machine learning from large text corpora. Since then, she has invested efforts to popularize AI ethics and has taken a stand against hype over large language models.

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