Christopher Potts is a leading American linguist and computational linguistics scholar, currently serving as Professor of Linguistics and Chair of the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University, with a courtesy appointment in Computer Science. He is also a core member of Stanford’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) research community. He received his B.A. from New York University and his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Prior to joining Stanford, he held a faculty position at the University of Chicago.
In terms of academic service, Potts has played an active role in the global research community. He has served on program committees and as an area chair for major international conferences such as ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics), and is a frequent reviewer and contributor to leading journals and conferences in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. At Stanford, he teaches key courses including Natural Language Understanding, Pragmatics, and Sentiment Analysis, and has trained many students who have gone on to influential roles in academia and industry.
His research is grounded in formal semantics and pragmatics, where he made foundational contributions to the study of conventional implicature and expressive meaning. He has successfully bridged theoretical linguistics with computational methods, advancing work in computational semantics, sentiment analysis, and large-scale language modeling. In recent years, his research has focused on large language models and pragmatic reasoning, aiming to enable AI systems to better understand context, emotion, and implied meaning.