Janet B. Pierrehumbert
University of Oxford
Janet B. Pierrehumbert is the Professor of Language Modelling in the University of Oxford Engineering Science Department. She holds degrees in Linguistics from Harvard and MIT. Much of her Ph.D thesis work was done in the Department of Linguistics and AI Research at AT&T Bell Labs, where she also served as a Member of Technical staff until 1989. She then took up a faculty position in Linguistics at Northwestern University, establishing an interdisciplinary research effort in experimental and computational linguistics. She is known for her research on prosody and intonation, as well as her work on how people acquire and use lexical systems that combine general abstract knowledge of word forms with detailed phonetic knowledge about individual words. In 2015, Pierrehumbert moved to her present position in the the Oxford e-Research Centre at Oxford, where she also holds a courtesy appointment in the Faculty of Linguistics, Phonetics, and Philology. Her lab group currently focusses on Natural Language Processing, emphasizing questions about the robustness and interpretability of language models and the dynamics of language in communities. She is a fellow of the LSA, the Cognitive Science Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2019, She was awarded the Medal for Scientific Achievement from the ISCA (the International Speech Communication Association) in 2020, and was elected as a member of the Academia Europaea in 2024.