Emily M. Bender
Emily M. Bender is an American linguist who works on multilingual grammar engineering and technology for endangered language documentation. She is the Howard and Frances Nostrand Endowed Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington. Her specialty lies in computational linguistics, which focuses on the techniques and computer science behind language speaking. With that she is also "an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering... and director of Computational Linguistics Laboratory" at the University as well. Bender has a wide range of languages that she is fascinated with, which includes Japanese, Chintang, Mandarin, Wambaya , ASL and of course English.  Contributions. Bender has constructed the LinGO Grammar Matrix, an open-source starter kit for the development of broad-coverage precision HPSG grammars. In 2013, she published "Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing: 100 Essentials from Morphology and Syntax," and in 2019, she published "Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing II: 100 Essentials from Semantics and Pragmatics" with Alex Lascarides, which both explain basic linguistic principles in a way that makes them accessible to NLP practitioners. In 2020, Bender co authored a draft paper with Google researcher Timnit Gebru and others that Google tried to block  from publication, part of a sequence of events leading to Gebru departing from Google, the details of which are disputed. The paper concerned ethical issues in building natural language processing systems using machine learning from large text corpora; as of December 2020, it has not been publicly released. Education and career. Bender received her PhD from Stanford University in 2000 for her research on syntactic variation and linguistic competence in African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Bender's AB in linguistics is from UC Berkeley and also attended Tohoku University. Before working at University of Washington, Bender held positions at Stanford  University, UC Berkeley and worked in industry at YY Technologies. She currently holds several positions at the University of Washington, where she has been faculty since 2003, including professor in the Department of Linguistics, adjunct professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, faculty director of the Master of Science in Computational Linguistics, and director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory. Bender is the current holder of the Howard and Frances Nostrand Endowed Professorship. Bender was elected VP-elect of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2021. Bender will serve as VP-elect in 2022, moving to Vice-President in  2023, President in 2024, and Past President in 2025.