Daniel Jurafsky

Daniel Jurafsky is the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor in Humanities, Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science at Stanford University, where he served as Chair of the Linguistics Department from 2014 to 2020. A leading figure in computational linguistics, he earned a B.A. in Linguistics with honors from the University of California, Berkeley in 1983 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the same institution in 1992. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley from 1992 to 1995. Prior to joining Stanford in 2004 as Associate Professor of Linguistics and (by courtesy) Computer Science, Jurafsky was Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Computer Science, and Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder from 1996 to 2001, advancing to Associate Professor from 2001 to 2003.

Jurafsky's research focuses on natural language processing, computational linguistics, speech recognition, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, prosody, and computational models of language, including bias, polarization, and dehumanization in language use. He co-authored the seminal textbook Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition (second edition, 2009, with James H. Martin), widely used in the field, and its ongoing third edition. His trade book The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (2014) was a finalist for the James Beard Foundation Book Award. Key publications include "On the opportunities and risks of foundation models" (2021), "Automatic Labeling of Semantic Roles" (2002), and influential papers on racial disparities in speech recognition and police interactions. Jurafsky has received prestigious honors such as the MacArthur Fellowship (2002), election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2020), Fellowship of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2020), AAAS Fellow (2020), and numerous best paper awards, including ACL Test-of-Time Awards. He co-created Stanford's pioneering Natural Language Processing MOOC with Christopher Manning, amplifying his impact on education and research in linguistics and computer science.

Professional Email: jurafsky@stanford.edu