Emily M. Bender

Situating Search

2022

Search systems, like many other applications of machine learning, have become increasingly complex and opaque. The notions of relevance, usefulness, and trustworthiness with respect to information were already overloaded and often difficult to articulate, study, …

Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data

2020

The success of the large neural language models on many NLP tasks is exciting. However, we find that these successes sometimes lead to hype in which these models are being described as "understanding" language or …

On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots

2021

The past 3 years of work in NLP have been characterized by the development and deployment of ever larger language models, especially for English. BERT, its variants, GPT-2/3, and others, most recently Switch-C, have pushed …