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I am an associate professor in computational linguistics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. My work models both (i) the emergence of grammatical structure and (ii) variation in grammatical structure using large multi-lingual corpora. My recent work has also focused on the impact that linguistic variation has on models in NLP. I have published nearly 50 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.