Christopher David Manning (born September 18, 1965) is a
computer scientist
A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science.
Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...
and
applied linguist whose research in the areas of
natural language processing
Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...
,
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...
and
machine learning
Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...
is considered highly influential. He is the current Director of th
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL)
Manning has been described as “the leading researcher in natural language processing”,
well known for co-developing
GloVe
A glove is a garment covering the hand, with separate sheaths or openings for each finger including the thumb. Gloves protect and comfort hands against cold or heat, damage by friction, abrasion or chemicals, and disease; or in turn to provide a ...
word vectors; the bilinear or multiplicative form of
attention
Attention or focus, is the concentration of awareness on some phenomenon to the exclusion of other stimuli. It is the selective concentration on discrete information, either subjectively or objectively. William James (1890) wrote that "Atte ...
, now widely used in
artificial neural network
In machine learning, a neural network (also artificial neural network or neural net, abbreviated ANN or NN) is a computational model inspired by the structure and functions of biological neural networks.
A neural network consists of connected ...
s including the
transformer
In electrical engineering, a transformer is a passive component that transfers electrical energy from one electrical circuit to another circuit, or multiple Electrical network, circuits. A varying current in any coil of the transformer produces ...
; tree-structured recursive neural networks; and approaches to and systems for
Textual entailment
In natural language processing, textual entailment (TE), also known as natural language inference (NLI), is a directional relation between text fragments. The relation holds whenever the truth of one text fragment follows from another text.
Defin ...
. His main educational contributions are his textbooks ''Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing'' (1999) and ''Introduction to Information Retrieval'' (2008), and his course CS224N Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning, which is available online. Manning also pioneered the development of well-maintained open source
computational linguistics
Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, computational linguistics ...
software packages, including CoreNLP, Stanza, and GloVe.
Manning is the
Thomas M. Siebel Professor in Machine Learning and a professor of
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
and Computer Science at
Stanford University
Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...
. He received a BA (Hons) degree majoring in mathematics, computer science, and linguistics from the
Australian National University
The Australian National University (ANU) is a public university, public research university and member of the Group of Eight (Australian universities), Group of Eight, located in Canberra, the capital of Australia. Its main campus in Acton, A ...
(1989) and a PhD in linguistics from Stanford (1994), under the guidance of
Joan Bresnan
Joan Wanda Bresnan FBA (born August 22, 1945) is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities Emerita at Stanford University. She is best known as one of the architects (with Ronald Kaplan) of the theoretical framework of lexical functional gram ...
.
He was an assistant professor at
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...
(1994–96) and a lecturer at the
University of Sydney
The University of Sydney (USYD) is a public university, public research university in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in both Australia and Oceania. One of Australia's six sandstone universities, it was one of the ...
(1996–99) before returning to Stanford as an assistant professor. At Stanford, he was promoted to associate professor in 2006 and to full professor in 2012. He was elected an
AAAI Fellow
Fellowship of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (abbreviated as AAAI Fellow or FAAAI) is an award granted to individuals that the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), judged to have made ...
in 2010.
He was previously President of the
Association for Computational Linguistics
The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is a scientific and professional organization for people working on natural language processing. Its namesake conference is one of the primary high impact conferences for natural language proce ...
(2015) and he has received an honorary doctorate from the
University of Amsterdam
The University of Amsterdam (abbreviated as UvA, ) is a public university, public research university located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Established in 1632 by municipal authorities, it is the fourth-oldest academic institution in the Netherlan ...
(2023). Manning was awarded the IEEE John von Neumann Medal “for advances in computational representation and analysis of natural language” in 2024.
Manning's linguistic work includes his dissertation ''Ergativity: Argument Structure and Grammatical Relations'' (1996), a monograph
''Complex Predicates and Information Spreading in LFG'' (1999), and his work developing
Universal Dependencies
Universal Dependencies, frequently abbreviated as UD, is an international cooperative project to create treebanks of the world's languages. These treebanks are openly accessible and available. Core applications are automated text processing in th ...
, from which he is the namesake of
Manning's Law.
Manning's PhD students include
Dan Klein
Daniel Klein (born 1976) is an American computer scientist and professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on natural language processing and artificial intelligence.
He was educated at Mt. Leb ...
,
Sepandar Kamvar, Richard Socher, and
Danqi Chen.
[ In 2021, he joined AIX Ventures]
Bibliography
*
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References
1965 births
Living people
Australian computer scientists
Australian National University alumni
Stanford University alumni
Stanford University faculty
Natural language processing researchers
Carnegie Mellon University faculty
Academic staff of the University of Sydney
{{Australia-scientist-stub
Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence