Christopher Potts
Also known as Chris Potts, Christopher E. Potts
Christopher Potts is a Stanford linguist whose work spans recursive sentiment models and language-model programming. He earned a BA at NYU in 1999 and a PhD at UC Santa Cruz in 2003, then joined UMass Amherst and Stanford. His 2013 sentiment-treebank paper received the ACL Test-of-Time Paper Award in 2023. With collaborators, he coauthored DSPy, a 2023 programming model for developing and optimizing language-model pipelines. He coauthored papers on prompt optimization in 2025 and language-model attribution in 2026; as of October 2026, he is a professor of linguistics and chair of Stanford’s Department of Linguistics.
- Now at
- Stanford University
- Works
- 285
- Citations
- 26,646
- h-index
- 51
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
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1999–2003
Studying at NYU and UCSC
He earns a BA at NYU in 1999 and a PhD at UC Santa Cruz in 2003.
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2003–2009
Assistant professor at UMass
He joins UMass Amherst as an assistant professor in 2003 and becomes associate professor in 2008.
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2009–2020
Associate professor at Stanford
He joins Stanford as a tenured associate professor in 2009 and becomes chair of its Department of Linguistics in 2020.
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2013–2023
A sentiment-treebank paper
He coauthors Recursive Deep Models for Semantic Compositionality Over a Sentiment Treebank in 2013; ACL names it a Test-of-Time Paper Award winner in 2023.
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2023
Introducing DSPy
He coauthors the 2023 DSPy paper, which presents a programming model that abstracts language-model pipelines as text-transformation graphs for development and optimization.
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2025
Optimizing language-model programs
In 2025, he coauthors Composing policy gradients and prompt optimization for language model programs.
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2026
Attributing language-model outputs
In 2026, he coauthors Matryoshka attribution, a paper on attributing language-model outputs to representations and weights.
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As of October 2026
Chair of Stanford Linguistics
He is chair of Stanford’s Department of Linguistics and a professor of linguistics.
Sources and credits
Photo: stanford.edu; Christopher Potts; creator not stated. License: Not stated by source. Source: stanford.edu. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.
- Christopher Potts' Profile | Stanford Profiles
- Recursive Deep Models for Semantic Compositionality Over a Sentiment Treebank
- Manning and Potts recognized by ACL
- DSPy: Compiling Declarative Language Model Calls into Self-Improving Pipelines
- DSPy: Compiling Declarative Language Model Calls into Self-Improving Pipelines
- Christopher Potts: Papers