Emily M. Bender

Emily Bender
Emily Bender
Born	Emily Menon Bender; 1973 (age 52–53)
Known for	Research on the risks of large language models and ethics of NLP; Coining the term Stochastic parrot; Research on the use of Head-driven phrase structure grammar in computational linguistics;
Spouse	Vijay Menon
Mother	Sheila Bender
Academic background
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley (AB); Stanford University (MA, PhD)
Thesis	Syntactic variation and linguistic competence: The case of AAVE copula absence (2000)
Doctoral advisor	Tom Wasow; Penelope Eckert
Academic work
Discipline	Linguistics
Sub-discipline	Syntax; Computational Linguistics;
Institutions	University of Washington

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.

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.