Richard Futrell

Richard Futrell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Language Science at the University of California, Irvine. He leads the Language Processing Group, focusing on understanding language processing in humans and machines through information theory and Bayesian cognitive modeling. His research also extends to NLP and AI interpretability, emphasizing the shared information-processing constraints between humans and language models. His work explores universals of language structure and their explanations through generic information-theoretic principles.

Dr. Futrell's research spans computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive science, with notable contributions to dependency length minimization, word order universals, and the efficiency of language design. He has received awards including the ACL Best Paper Award (2024) and the Best Paper Award for Computational Modeling of Language (2023). His group investigates topics such as code-switching, syntactic priming, and the cognitive foundations of language processing.

His publications address language universals, computational models of syntax, and the interplay between linguistic structure and processing efficiency. Key contributions include studies on dependency locality, the role of memory and surprisal in sentence comprehension, and the application of information theory to adjective ordering and morphological fusion.