Emily M. Bender is a computational linguist at the University of Washington, where she is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics, the Director of the Professional MS in Computational Linguistics, and the holder of the Thomas L. and Margo G. Wyckoff Endowed Professorship. She has been on the UW faculty since 2003. Her faculty page lists three main research areas: multilingual grammar engineering centered on the LinGO Grammar Matrix, the relationship between linguistics and natural language processing, and the societal impacts of language technology.
She is the lead author of “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” (FAccT 2021), co-authored with Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell. The paper popularized the “stochastic parrot” metaphor for systems that reproduce sequences of language without reference to meaning. Her faculty page describes a strand of work on the “dangers of specific technology (such as large language models).”
Bender is widely cited as a skeptic of claims that large language models understand language, and she has emphasized the distinction between modeling the form of language and modeling its meaning. Her primary-sourced contributions in this knowledge base are her academic work in computational linguistics and her authorship of the Stochastic Parrots paper.