Emily M. Bender

Emily M. Bender is a professor of computational linguistics at the University of Washington, known for her work on grammar engineering — building computationally implementable grammars — and for her influential critiques of NLP ethics and large language model claims.

Bender co-authored the 2021 paper 'On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots,' with Timnit Gebru and others, which argued that large language models reflect and amplify societal harms without genuine understanding. The paper became one of the most widely discussed critiques of LLM development and contributed to public debate about AI ethics.

Bender has been a prominent skeptic of attributing understanding or intelligence to large language models, coining the term 'stochastic parrot' to describe systems that fluently mimic human language without comprehension. She advocates for more precise language about what these models actually do.

Bender is the author of 'Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing: 100 Essentials from Morphology and Syntax,' a textbook aimed at bridging linguistics and computational work. She is also a co-developer of the LinGO Grammar Matrix, a framework for creating precision grammars across multiple languages.