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 (2025) 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.
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
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
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
Dunn, J. E., & Edwards-Brown, L. (2024). Geographically-Informed Language Identification. In Proceedings of the Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation
Dunn, J., & Edwards-Brown, L. (2024). Geographically-Informed Language Identification. In N. Calzolari, M.-Y. Kan, V. Hoste, A. Lenci, S. Sakti, & N. Xue (Eds.), 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC-COLING 2024 - Main Conference Proceedings (pp. 7672-7682). (2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC-COLING 2024 - Main Conference Proceedings). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).