Contact Information
707 S Mathews Avenue
M/C 168
Urbana, IL 61801
Additional Campus Affiliations
Associate Professor, Linguistics
External Links
I am a computational linguist. My research models both (i) the emergence of grammatical structure within individuals and (ii) variation in grammatical structure across populations. To support this research, I've worked to develop large multi-lingual geographic corpora. My recent work has also focused on the impact of linguistic variation on natural language processing and on low-resource contexts. I have published over 40 papers on computational linguistics and my first book was recently published by Cambridge University Press. My interdisciplinary teaching experience includes a MOOC which has now taught 14,000 students about NLP.
If you are a student interested in studying computational linguistics at Illinois, feel free to send me an email!
Highlighted Publications
Dunn, J. (2022). Natural Language Processing for Corpus Linguistics. (Elements in Corpus Linguistics). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009070447
Recent Publications
Dunn, J. (2023). Exploring the Constructicon: Linguistic Analysis of a Computational CxG. In CxGsNLP 2023 - 1st International Workshop on Construction Grammars and NLP (CxGs+NLP, GURT/SyntaxFest 2023), Proceedings of the Conference (pp. 1-11). (CxGsNLP 2023 - 1st International Workshop on Construction Grammars and NLP (CxGs+NLP, GURT/SyntaxFest 2023), Proceedings of the Conference). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Dunn, J. E. (2023). Syntactic variation across the grammar: Modelling a complex adaptive system. Frontiers in Complex Systems, Article 1273741. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcpxs.2023.1273741
Dunn, J. (2023). Variation and Instability in Dialect-Based Embedding Spaces. In Y. Scherrer, T. Jauhiainen, N. Ljubesic, P. Nakov, J. Tiedemann, & M. Zampieri (Eds.), ACL 2023 - 10th Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects, VarDial 2023 - Proceedings of the Workshop (pp. 67-77). (ACL 2023 - 10th Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects, VarDial 2023 - Proceedings of the Workshop). Association for Computational Linguistics.
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
Wong, S., Durward, M., Adams, B., & Dunn, J. (2023). cantnlp@LT-EDI-2023: Homophobia/Transphobia Detection in Social Media Comments using Spatio-Temporally Retrained Language Models. In B. R. Chakravarthi, B. Bharathi, J. Griffith, K. Bali, & P. Buitelaar (Eds.), Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (pp. 103-108). INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria. https://aclanthology.org/2023.ltedi-1.15