Emily M. Bender

American linguist, professor of linguistics at the University of Washington, where she directs its professional master's program in computational linguistics; she was president of the Association for Computational LinguisticsAssociation for Computational Linguistics, prop. n.: The scientific society at the center of research on language technology, from translation software to chatbots. It runs the field's leading conferences and a free online archive of their papers. in 2024. Her early research was in grammar engineering, including the multilingual LinGO Grammar Matrix. Her insistence that researchers name the language they study became known as the Bender rule, and with Batya Friedman she proposed data statements (2018) for documenting natural language processingnatural language processing, n.: The field that teaches computers to handle human language — to read, interpret, translate, summarize and produce text and speech. It is one of the oldest and largest areas of artificial intelligence. datasets. With Alexander Koller she argued in 'Climbing towards NLU' (2020), through the octopus testoctopus test, n.: A thought experiment in which a clever octopus learns to impersonate a stranded islander by eavesdropping on an undersea cable, without ever knowing what the words refer to. It asks whether text-trained AI can grasp meaning., that systems trained only on linguistic form cannot learn meaning; with Timnit GebruTimnit Gebru, prop. n.: An Ethiopian-born American computer scientist who exposed racial and gender bias in AI systems, co-wrote the 'stochastic parrots' paper, and founded an independent AI research institute., Angelina McMillan-Major and Margaret Mitchell she co-wrote the 2021 paper that coined 'stochastic parrotstochastic parrot, n.: A critical label for AI language systems, likening them to parrots that echo patterns in the text they were trained on, fluently but with no grasp of what the words mean.', warning of the environmental, social and epistemic costs of ever larger language modelslanguage model, n.: A system that has learned how likely different sequences of words are, so it can predict the next word in a text and, by doing that repeatedly, write text of its own.. With the sociologist Alex Hanna she hosts a podcast critiquing AI hypeAI hype, n.: Exaggerated claims about what AI can do or will soon do, made to attract money, attention or customers, which can mislead the public and policymakers. and co-wrote 'The AI Con' (2025).