Contact Information
707 S Mathews Avenue
M/C 168
Urbana, IL 61801
Additional Campus Affiliations
Associate Professor, Linguistics
Director of Undergraduate Studies, Linguistics
External Links
I am a computational linguist. My research uses computational experiments to understand how grammar emerges within individuals and how it varies across populations.
To make this research possible, I've developed large multi-lingual geographic corpora. These geographic corpora also enable us to adapt language technology for specific populations and to study how interacting with language technology can change language. I have published nearly 50 papers on computational linguistics and 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 favorite teaching experience is a MOOC which has taught over 14,000 students about natural language processing.
I am a member of the Computational Linguistics Lab at Illinois and the university's Natural Language Processing Group.
If you are a student interested in studying computational linguistics at Illinois, please send me an email!
Highlighted Publications
Dunn, J. E. (2024). Computational Construction Grammar: A Usage-Based Approach. (Elements in Cognitive Linguistics). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009233743
Dunn, J. (2022). Natural Language Processing for Corpus Linguistics. (Elements in Corpus Linguistics). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009070447
Li, H., Dunn, J., & Nini, A. (2023). Register variation remains stable across 60 languages. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 19(3), 397-426. https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2021-0090
Dunn, J. (2022). Exposure and emergence in usage-based grammar: Computational experiments in 35 languages. Cognitive Linguistics, 33(4), 659-699. https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2021-0106
Recent Publications
Anand, G., & Dunn, J. E. (2025). Mapping Semantic Domains Across India’s Social Media: Networks, Geography, and Social Factors. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Semantics (pp. 307). Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). https://aclanthology.org/2025.iwcs-main.27/
Dunn, J. E., & Wong, S. (2025). Language Contact and Population Contact as Sources of Dialect Similarity. Languages, 10(8), Article 188. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages10080188
Dunn, J. E., & Eida, M. M. (2025). LLMs Learn Constructions That Humans Do Not Know. In Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Construction Grammars and NLP (pp. 13-23). Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). https://aclanthology.org/2025.cxgsnlp-1.2/
Wong, S., Adams, B., & Dunn, J. E. (2025). Detecting Linguistic Diversity on Social Media. In Cartography and GIScience in Australasia and Oceania: Including twenty years of GeoCart Springer. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2502.21224
Dunn, J. E. (2024). Computational Construction Grammar: A Usage-Based Approach. (Elements in Cognitive Linguistics). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009233743