Emily M. Bender

Research on the risks of large language models and ethics of NLP Research on the use of Head-driven phrase structure grammar in computational linguistics Emily Menon Bender (born 1973) is an American linguist and professor at the University of Washington where she directs its Computational Linguistics Laboratory. She specializes in computational linguistics and natural language processing.[6][7] She has published several papers on the risks of large language models and on ethics in natural language processing and co-authored the 2025 book The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want.[8][9] Bender earned an AB in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1995. She received her MA from Stanford University in 1997 and her PhD from Stanford in 2000 for her research on syntactic variation and linguistic competence in African American Vernacular English (AAVE).[10][4] She was supervised by Tom Wasow and Penelope Eckert.[5]