Christopher Manning

Career

Christopher Manning earned a PhD in linguistics at Stanford in 1994, then taught in the Computational Linguistics Program at Carnegie Mellon University from 1994 to 1996 and in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney from 1996 to 1999. Manning returned to Stanford in 1999 as an assistant professor of computer science and linguistics, became associate professor in 2006 and full professor in 2012, and has held the Thomas M. Siebel Professorship in Machine Learning since 2017.¹

Manning founded the Stanford NLP Group, is a co-founder and Senior Fellow of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and served as President of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2015.¹

Research

Manning's earlier work built empirical, probabilistic approaches to natural language processing, including natural language inference, syntactic parsing, machine translation and multilingual processing. From 2010 the work turned to neural networks for language understanding, covering sentiment analysis, paraphrase detection, attention, neural machine translation, question answering, self-supervised pre-training and dependency parsing.¹

With Jeffrey Pennington and Richard Socher, Manning introduced the GloVe word vectors at EMNLP 2014. In linguistics, Manning is a principal developer of Stanford Dependencies and Universal Dependencies, and current topics include compositionality, large pre-trained language models, knowledge and reasoning, and low-resource languages.²¹

Teaching and writing

Manning co-wrote the textbooks Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing (MIT Press, 1999) with Hinrich Schütze and Introduction to Information Retrieval (Cambridge University Press, 2008) with Prabhakar Raghavan and Schütze, along with monographs on ergativity and complex predicates. Manning taught CS 276, Information Retrieval and Web Search, from 2003 through 2019, and co-taught the 2012 Coursera NLP class with Dan Jurafsky.¹

Manning has long released open-source NLP software through the Stanford NLP Group, including Stanford CoreNLP and the Apache-2.0 licensed Python library Stanza, whose ACL 2020 system paper Manning co-authored.¹³

Work and contributions

• Stanza Open-source code

  Co-author of the ACL 2020 system demonstration paper that the Stanza README gives as its citation. The Stanford NLP Python library for tokenization, sentence segmentation, named entity recognition, and parsing is released under the Apache License 2.0, and Manning's homepage names Stanford CoreNLP and Stanza as the group's open-source NLP software.³¹

• GloVe: Global Vectors for Word Representation Published research

  Co-author with Jeffrey Pennington and Richard Socher of the EMNLP 2014 paper that introduced the GloVe word vectors.²

• CS224N: Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning Published research

  Taught the Stanford course nearly every year from 2000 to 2024; the homepage links complete lecture video playlists and slides from five editions of the course.¹

Timeline

1. 1994Completed a PhD in linguistics at Stanford and joined Carnegie Mellon University as an assistant professor.¹
2. 1996Became a lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney.¹
3. 1999Joined Stanford's computer science and linguistics departments and published Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing.¹
4. 2008Published Introduction to Information Retrieval with Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schütze.¹
5. 2012Became a full professor at Stanford and co-taught one of the early Coursera NLP courses.¹
6. Oct 2014Co-authored the GloVe word-vector paper at EMNLP 2014.²
7. 2015Served as President of the Association for Computational Linguistics.¹
8. 2017Named Thomas M. Siebel Professor in Machine Learning.¹
9. 2020Co-authored the ACL 2020 system paper for the Stanza Python NLP library.³

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

• Assistant Professor, Computational Linguistics Program (1994–96), Carnegie Mellon University¹

Honors and recognition

• IEEE John von Neumann Medal · IEEE, 2024¹
• ACL Test of Time Award (three successive awards, 2023–2025) · Association for Computational Linguistics, 2025¹
• ACM Fellow · Association for Computing Machinery¹
• AAAI Fellow · Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence¹
• ACL Fellow · Association for Computational Linguistics¹
• Member, National Academy of Engineering · U.S. National Academy of Engineering¹
• Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences · American Academy of Arts and Sciences¹
• Honorary Doctorate · University of Amsterdam, 2023¹
• EACL Best Paper Award · European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026), 2026¹

Where they work

• Stanford University 40 people in the wiki

Related people

• Tatsunori HashimotoAlso at Stanford University
• Percy LiangAlso at Stanford University
• Abigail SeeAlso at Stanford University
• Dan JurafskyAlso at Stanford University
• Daphne KollerAlso at Stanford University
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