Professor Janet Pierrehumbert holds a faculty position as Professor of Language Modeling at the Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, within the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics. Her work bridges computational linguistics, phonetics, and sociolinguistics, focusing on language dynamics, word formation, and the interplay between social factors and linguistic structure. She leads research in modeling language change, dialect adaptation, and the application of large language models to understand morphological and semantic patterns. Her recent work explores computational frameworks for analyzing linguistic variation, including temporal dynamics in language, geographic adaptation of models, and bias detection in embeddings. Her research themes encompass computational linguistics, phonology, and sociophonetics, with a strong emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches. Notable contributions include studies on exemplar-based phonology, the role of frequency in sound change, and the emergence of linguistic systems through grassroots mechanisms. She also investigates the intersection of technology and language, such as using graph neural networks and social media data to decode climate disagreement and political discourse trends. Professor Pierrehumbert’s lab affiliations include the Clarendon Institute and the Phonetics Lab at Oxford. Her work has been published in top venues like Annual Review of Linguistics and Cognition , and she actively contributes to conferences such as Cognitive Science Society and ACL. Her current projects explore dialect fairness in AI, temporal language modeling, and the sociolinguistic dimensions of computational language processing.
