Benjamin Bergen

Benjamin Bergen is a Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego, affiliated with the Language and Cognition Lab. His research focuses on language processing, metaphor, profanity, and embodied cognition. He holds a PhD from UC Berkeley (2001) and has authored over 150 peer-reviewed publications. Bergen's work bridges cognitive science, linguistics, and AI, investigating how humans and machines process meaning.

Research interests include: (1) Embodied simulation in language understanding, (2) Neural language models' cognitive plausibility, (3) Impact of swearing on communication, (4) Multimodal interaction effects during driving. Recent projects explore LLM capabilities in theory of mind tasks and cross-lingual transfer learning.

Public engagement includes over 100 media appearances since 2016, including interviews with Communications of the ACM (2023), Discover Magazine (2023), and Netflix's History of Swear Words (2021). Authored popular science books on profanity and cognitive linguistics.