Jonathan Dunn

Dr. Jonathan Dunn currently serves as Associate Professor in Linguistics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, following his roles as Senior Lecturer and Lecturer at the University of Canterbury. His research focuses on computational linguistics, particularly modeling the emergence of grammatical structure within individuals and variation across populations using large multi-lingual corpora. His academic journey includes a PhD from Purdue University, followed by positions at Illinois Institute of Technology and as a Visiting Scientist at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. His contributions to the field include over 40 published papers and two significant monographs with Cambridge University Press: "Computational Construction Grammar" (2024) and "Natural Language Processing for Corpus Linguistics" (2022). As an educator, he has developed successful MOOCs that have taught over 14,000 students about natural language processing. His research impact extends to developing large multi-lingual geographic corpora and exploring the effects of linguistic variation on natural language processing, particularly in low-resource contexts. Through the earthLings project, he has created innovative approaches to understanding how large-scale population movements influence language and how human geography is reflected in language data. His interdisciplinary work combines computational methods with linguistic theory to advance our understanding of language variation and change.