Emily M. Bender
Also known as Emily Bender
Emily M. Bender is a linguist and professor at the University of Washington. She earned her doctorate at Stanford in 2001 and joined Washington in 2003. With colleagues, she developed the Grammar Matrix, a starter kit for building language grammars. She and Batya Friedman proposed data statements to document the populations and context behind language datasets. Her later work examined claims about meaning in language models and the risks of training increasingly large systems. Bender co-authored the Stochastic Parrots paper with Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major and Margaret Mitchell. She also wrote The AI Con with Alex Hanna. Her research and public writing give people precise terms for examining language technology, its data and its social effects.
- Now at
- University of Washington
- Works
- 154
- Citations
- 12,498
- h-index
- 30
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
-
2001
Completing a linguistics doctorate
Completed her linguistics doctorate at Stanford in 2001.
-
2018
Recording where language data comes from
Proposed Data Statements with Batya Friedman in 2018.
-
2020
Separating form from meaning
Coauthored a paper with Alexander Koller on the limits of learning meaning from language form.
-
2021
Questioning the costs of large models
Coauthored On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots in 2021.
-
2025
Taking the argument to readers
Published The AI Con with Alex Hanna in 2025.
Sources and credits
Photo: King of Hearts, via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: commons.wikimedia.org. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.
