PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Chris Dyer

Chris Dyer is a natural language processing researcher whose work spans statistical machine translation, structured language models, and sign-language AI. He earned a linguistics PhD at the University of Maryland in 2010, coauthored cdec for statistical translation, and helped develop recurrent neural network grammars for parsing and language modeling. At Carnegie Mellon, he completed a postdoc with Noah Smith and served as an assistant professor; he received the Presidential Early Career Award in 2017 and worked at DeepMind in London, where he coauthored the Gopher language-model study. As of October 2026, he is a Senior Staff Scientist at Google DeepMind in London and a member of the core team behind SL2T, its sign-language-to-text model.

Works
276
Citations
37,931
h-index
76

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. July 2010

    The cdec translation framework

    In July 2010, he coauthors cdec, a decoder, alignment, and learning framework for finite-state and context-free translation models.

  2. December 2010

    A linguistics PhD

    He earns a PhD in linguistics from the University of Maryland in December 2010. His research with Philip Resnik develops statistical machine-translation models that handle errors in automatic linguistic analysis.

  3. November 2014

    Assistant professor at CMU

    In November 2014, he is an Assistant Professor of Language Technologies in Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science and holds an affiliated appointment in its Machine Learning Department. He completes a postdoc with Noah Smith at CMU's Language Technologies Institute before joining the faculty.

  4. 2016

    Recurrent neural network grammars

    In 2016, he coauthors recurrent neural network grammars, probabilistic sentence models with explicit phrase structure that support parsing and language modeling.

  5. 2017

    A Presidential Early Career Award

    In 2017, he receives the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).

  6. 2017

    Working at DeepMind

    In 2017, he works at DeepMind in London while serving as an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon.

  7. 2021

    The Gopher language model

    In 2021, he coauthors an analysis of language-model scaling that evaluates Gopher, a 280-billion-parameter Transformer.

  8. As of October 2026

    Senior Staff Scientist at Google DeepMind

    As of October 2026, he is a Senior Staff Scientist at Google DeepMind in London. By August 2026, he is part of the core team behind SL2T, a sign-language-to-text model.

Career

  1. Since 2017Google DeepMindSenior Staff Scientist
  2. 2016–2017University of Oxford
  3. 2016–2017Google
  4. 2014Carnegie Mellon UniversityPostdoc, Assistant Professor of Language Technologies
  5. 2013–2015Institute for Systems Engineering and Computers

Education

  1. 2010University of MarylandPhD

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

  1. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Chris Dyer. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  2. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Google. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.
  3. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Google. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.
  4. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes Google. We estimate that 539 of the 6,766 people with a known current organization (8%) hold both a university role and a company role, including 20% of people at companies and 13% of people at universities.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Chris Dyer yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. cdec: A Decoder, Alignment, and Learning Framework for Finite-State and Context-Free Translation Models - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Conditional Random Field Autoencoders for Feature-Rich, Unsupervised NLP | HKUST CSE cse.hkust.edu.hk. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Philip Resnik's Advisees psresnik.github.io. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. [1602.07776] Recurrent Neural Network Grammars arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Dyer, Former CLIP Lab Member Advised by Resnik, Receives PECASE Award | University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies umiacs.umd.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. [2112.11446] Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Putting sign language AI into users’ hands — Google DeepMind deepmind.google. Checked 21 October 2026.