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I am an associate professor in computational linguistics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. My research uses computational experiments to understand how grammar emerges within individuals and how it varies across populations. This includes understanding the impact that linguistic variation has on models in natural language processing.

I have published 50 scientific papers as well as three monographs with Cambridge University Press: Syntactic Variation from Individuals to Populations (2026) and Computational Construction Grammar (2024) and Natural Language Processing for Corpus Linguistics (2022). My interdisciplinary teaching experience includes a MOOC which has taught 14,000 students about NLP.

My research models two related phenomena:

(A) the emergence of grammatical structure within individuals, with a focus on the degree to which structure can be learned from usage alone

(B) variation in grammatical structures across populations and across registers, with a focus on how grammars change as complex systems

The basic question is how language learning and language change interact at scale when we observe both an entire grammar and a global community of speaker-hearers. Computational models applied to large corpora provide a method for solving this difficult problem.

I am a member of the Computational Linguistics Lab at Illinois and the university’s Natural Language Processing Group.