I am a computational linguist. My research uses computational experiments to understand how grammar emerges within individuals and how it varies across populations. What makes this approach different is that I consider language as a cognitive system and a social system at the same time, and at scale.
To make these experiments possible, I’ve developed large multi-lingual geographic corpora. These corpora also enable us to adapt language technology for specific populations and to study how interacting with language technology is changing language.
I have published over 50 papers on computational linguistics and 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 favorite teaching experience is a MOOC which has taught over 14,000 students about natural language processing.
I am a member of the Computational Linguistics Lab at Illinois and the university’s Natural Language Processing Group. I am also currently a Conrad Professorial Scholar in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (2026-2029) and an OpEd Project Public Voices Fellow (2026-2027).
If you are a student interested in studying computational linguistics at Illinois, please send me an email!
Jonathan Dunn 