PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Kristina N. Toutanova

Also known as Kristina Toutanova

Kristina Toutanova co-wrote BERT in 2018, a model that reports new state-of-the-art results on eleven natural language processing tasks. She is a research scientist at Google AI Language in Seattle and an affiliate faculty member at the University of Washington. Her 2005 Stanford PhD, completed under Chris Manning, centered on statistical models for syntactic and semantic disambiguation. Before joining Google in 2017, she was a researcher at Microsoft Research. In 2019 she co-authored Natural Questions, a benchmark for question answering research.

Timeline

  1. 2005

    A Stanford computer science PhD

    She completes a Stanford PhD in 2005, advised by Chris Manning, with a thesis on statistical models for syntactic and semantic disambiguation.

  2. 2014

    Program co-chair for ACL 2014

    She co-chairs the program for ACL 2014.

  3. 2017

    Joining Google from Microsoft

    She moves from a researcher post at Microsoft Research to Google in 2017.

  4. 2018

    Co-authoring the BERT paper

    She co-authors BERT with Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang and Kenton Lee, and the paper is published at NAACL 2019. The model reports new state-of-the-art results on eleven natural language processing tasks.

  5. 2019

    The Natural Questions benchmark

    Natural Questions, a benchmark for question answering research that she co-authors, appears in 2019.

  6. 2021

    General chair of NAACL 2021

    She serves as general chair for NAACL 2021.

  7. As of October 2026

    Research scientist at Google

    She is a research scientist at Google AI Language in Seattle and an affiliate faculty member at the University of Washington.

Sources and credits

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  1. Kristina Toutanova nlp.stanford.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  2. Christopher Manning and Ph.D. Students' Dissertations nlp.stanford.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  3. Dr. Kristina Toutanova | INSAIT insait.ai. Checked 14 October 2026.
  4. BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding research.google. Checked 14 October 2026.
  5. [1810.04805] BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  6. Natural Questions: A Benchmark for Question Answering Research - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  7. User:Kristina.toutanova - Admin Wiki aclweb.org. Checked 14 October 2026.