Christopher Potts
Professor of Linguistics and, by courtesy, of Computer Science
Web page: http://web.stanford.edu/people/cgpotts
Academic Appointments
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Professor, Linguistics
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Professor (By courtesy), Computer Science
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Member, Bio-X
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Faculty Affiliate, Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI)
Administrative Appointments
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Chair, Department of Linguistics, Stanford University (2020 - Present)
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Professor, Department of Linguistics, Stanford University (2016 - Present)
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Associate Professor (tenured), Department of Linguistics, Stanford University (2009 - 2016)
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Associate Professor (untenured), Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts Amherst (2008 - 2009)
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Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts Amherst (2003 - 2008)
Program Affiliations
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Symbolic Systems Program
Professional Education
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B.A., New York University, Linguistics Major, German Minor (1999)
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M.A., University of California, Santa Cruz, Linguistics (2000)
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Ph.D., University of California, Santa Cruz, Linguistics (2003)
2024-25 Courses
- Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics
LINGUIST 130A, LINGUIST 230A (Win) - Linguistic Research Discussion Group
LINGUIST 294 (Aut) - Research Workshop
LINGUIST 395 (Spr) - Undergraduate Research Seminar
LINGUIST 197A (Win) -
Independent Studies (23)
- Advanced Reading and Research
CS 499 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Advanced Reading and Research
CS 499P (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Curricular Practical Training
CS 390A (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Curricular Practical Training
CS 390B (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Curricular Practical Training
CS 390C (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Curricular Practical Training
LINGUIST 391A (Aut, Sum) - Directed Reading
LINGUIST 397 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Directed Research
LINGUIST 398 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Dissertation Research
LINGUIST 399 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Honors Research
LINGUIST 198 (Aut, Win, Spr) - Independent Project
CS 399 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Independent Project
CS 399P (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Independent Study
LINGUIST 199 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Independent Study
SYMSYS 196 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Independent Work
CS 199 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - M.A. Project
LINGUIST 390 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Master's Degree Project
SYMSYS 290 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Ph.D. Research
CME 400 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Research Projects in Linguistics
LINGUIST 396 (Win) - Senior Honors Tutorial
SYMSYS 190 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Senior Project
CS 191 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Supervised Undergraduate Research
CS 195 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Writing Intensive Senior Research Project
CS 191W (Aut, Win, Spr)
- Advanced Reading and Research
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Prior Year Courses
2023-24 Courses
- Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics
LINGUIST 130A, LINGUIST 230A (Win) - Linguistic Research Discussion Group
LINGUIST 294 (Aut) - Research Workshop
LINGUIST 395 (Spr) - Undergraduate Research Seminar
LINGUIST 197A (Win)
2022-23 Courses
- Advanced Semantics
LINGUIST 230B (Aut) - Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics
LINGUIST 130A, LINGUIST 230A (Win) - Natural Language Understanding
CS 224U, LINGUIST 188, LINGUIST 288, SYMSYS 195U (Spr) - Undergraduate Research Seminar
LINGUIST 197A (Win)
2021-22 Courses
- Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics
LINGUIST 130A, LINGUIST 230A (Win) - Linguistic Research Discussion Group
LINGUIST 294 (Aut) - Natural Language Understanding
CS 224U, LINGUIST 188, LINGUIST 288 (Spr) - Programming for Linguists
LINGUIST 278 (Aut) - Undergraduate Research Seminar
LINGUIST 197A (Win)
- Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics
Stanford Advisees
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Anjali Ragupathi, Kunal Sinha -
Doctoral Dissertation Reader (AC)
Keshav Santhanam, Tianyi Zhang -
Orals Chair
Trevor Gale, Nelson Liu -
Postdoctoral Faculty Sponsor
Peter West -
Doctoral Dissertation Advisor (AC)
Adolfo Hermosillo, Omar Khattab, Joshua Rozner -
Orals Evaluator
Omar Khattab, Keshav Santhanam -
Master's Program Advisor
Ari Barbella-Blaha, Krrish Chawla, Emer Dayton, Brian Lee, Andy Ouyang, Pranava Singhal, Rachel Wang -
Doctoral Dissertation Co-Advisor (AC)
Tristan Thrush -
Doctoral (Program)
Aryaman Arora, Jing Huang, Julie Kallini, Omar Khattab, Krista Opsahl-Ong, Dilara Soylu, Zen Wu
All Publications
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A data-driven framework for mapping domains of human neurobiology
Nature Neuroscience
2021
View details for DOI 10.1038/s41593-021-00948-9
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A case for deep learning in semantics: Response to Pater
LANGUAGE
2019; 95 (1): E115–E124
View details for DOI 10.1353/lan.2019.0019
View details for Web of Science ID 000462682500007
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Enculturation Trajectories: Language, Cultural Adaptation, and Individual Outcomes in Organizations
MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
2018; 64 (3): 1348–64
View details for DOI 10.1287/mnsc.2016.2671
View details for Web of Science ID 000428415600021
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Fitting In or Standing Out? The Tradeoffs of Structural and Cultural Embeddedness
AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
2016; 81 (6): 1190-1222
View details for DOI 10.1177/0003122416671873
View details for Web of Science ID 000389897700004
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Embedded Implicatures as Pragmatic Inferences under Compositional Lexical Uncertainty
JOURNAL OF SEMANTICS
2016; 33 (4): 755-802
View details for DOI 10.1093/jos/ffv012
View details for Web of Science ID 000393183900004
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Bringing Machine Learning and Compositional Semantics Together
ANNUAL REVIEW OF LINGUISTICS, VOL 1
2015; 1: 355-376
View details for DOI 10.1146/annurev-linguist-030514-125312
View details for Web of Science ID 000350994000018
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Modeling the Lifespan of Discourse Entities with Application to Coreference Resolution
JOURNAL OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE RESEARCH
2015; 52: 445-475
View details for Web of Science ID 000351921800001
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That straight talk: Sarah Palin and the sociolinguistics of demonstratives
JOURNAL OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS
2014; 18 (1): 3-31
View details for DOI 10.1111/josl.12062
View details for Web of Science ID 000332844800001
- A computational approach to politeness with application to social factors Proceedings of the 2013 Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2013: 250–59
- Emergence of Gricean maxims from multi-agent decision theory Human Language Technologies: The 2013 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2013: 1072–81
- The life and death of discourse entities: identifying singleton mentions Human Language Technologies: The 2013 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2013: 627–33
- Presupposition and implicature The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory edited by Lappin, S., Fox, C. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 2013; 2
- No country for old members: user lifecycle and linguistic change in online communities Proceedings of the 22nd World Wide Web Conference 2013: 307–17
- Implicatures and nested beliefs in approximate decentralized-POMDPs Proceedings of the 2013 Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2013: 74–80
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Did It Happen? The Pragmatic Complexity of Veridicality Assessment
COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS
2012; 38 (2): 301-333
View details for Web of Science ID 000306100900003
- Trust propagation with mixedeffects models Proceedings of the 6th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media 2012
- Goal-driven answers in the Cards dialogue corpus edited by Arnett, N., Bennett, R. 2012: 1–20
- Corpus evidence for preference-driven interpretation Proceedings of the 18th Amsterdam Colloquium: Revised Selected Papers edited by Aloni, M., Kimmelman, V., Roelofsen, F., Sassoon, G. W., Schulz, K., Westera, M. 2012
- Teaching pragmatics Teaching Linguistics edited by Kuiper, K. London: Equinox Publishing. 2011: 51–65
- On the negativity of negation Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 2011: 636–59
- Modeling expert effects and common ground using Questions Under Discussion Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop on Building Representations of Common Ground with Intelligent Agents 2011
- Learning word vectors for sentiment analysis Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2011
- Veridicality and utterance meaning Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing: Workshop on Semantic Annotation for Computational Linguistic Resources 2011
- Pragmatics The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics edited by Mitkov, R. Oxford University Press. 2011; 2nd
- Sentiment flow through hyperlink networks Proceedings of the 5th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media 2011
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Harmonic Grammar with linear programming: from linear systems to linguistic typology
PHONOLOGY
2010; 27 (1): 77-117
View details for DOI 10.1017/S0952675710000047
View details for Web of Science ID 000277884300003
- Affective ‘this’ Linguistic Issues in Language Technology 2010; 3 (5): 1 - 30
- “Was it good? It was provocative.” Learning the meaning of scalar adjectives Proceedings 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2010: 167–76
- Semantics–pragmatics interactions The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences edited by Hogan, P. C. Cambridge University Press. 2010: 758–759
- Affective demonstratives and the division of pragmatic labor Logic, Language, and Meaning: 17th Amsterdam Colloquium Revised Selected Papers edited by Aloni, M., Bastiaanse, H., Jager, T., Schulz, K. 2010: 42–52
- Crowdsourcing and language studies: The new generation of linguistic data Proceedings of the NAACL 2010 Workshop on Creating Speech and Language Data With Amazons Mechanical Turk 2010: 122–30
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Perspective-shifting with appositives and expressives
LINGUISTICS AND PHILOSOPHY
2009; 32 (6): 523-552
View details for DOI 10.1007/s10988-010-9070-5
View details for Web of Science ID 000276235600001
- Not a simple yes or no: Uncertainty in indirect answers Proceedings of the 10th Annual SIGDIAL Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue 2009: 136–43
- Predicting perspectival orientation for appositives Proceedings of the 45th Annual Chicago Linguistic Society Meeting 2009
- The pragmatics of expressive content: Evidence from large corpora Sprache und Datenverarbeitung 2009; 33 (1 - 2): 5 - 21
- Formal pragmatics The Routledge Encyclopedia of Pragmatics edited by Cummings, L. London: Routledge. 2009: 167–170
- Review Article: Hagit Borer’s Structuring Sense Vol I-II Language 2008; 82 (2): 348 - 369
- The pragmatics of conventional implicature and expressive content Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning edited by Maienborn, C., Portner, P. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 2008
- Expressives and identity conditions Linguistic Inquiry 2008; 40 (2): 356–366
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The expressive dimension (The theory is multidimensional in the sense that descriptives and expressives are fundamentally different but receive a unified logical treatment)
THEORETICAL LINGUISTICS
2007; 33 (2): 165-198
View details for DOI 10.1515/TL.2007.011
View details for Web of Science ID 000253290700001
- Conventional implicatures, a distinguished class of meanings The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces edited by Ramchand, G., Reiss, C. Oxford University Press. 2007: 475–501
- Into the conventional-implicature dimension Philosophy Compass 2007; 4 (2): 665–679
- The pragmatic values of evidential sentences Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory edited by Gibson, M., Friedman, T. 2007: 71–88
- The dimensions of quotation Direct Compositionality edited by Baker, C., Jacobson, P. Oxford University Press. 2007: 405–431
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The centrality of expressive indices
THEORETICAL LINGUISTICS
2007; 33 (2): 255-268
View details for DOI 10.1515/TL.2007.019
View details for Web of Science ID 000253290700009
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Paul Grice: Philosopher and linguist (Book Review)
MIND
2006; 115 (459): 743-747
View details for DOI 10.1093/mind/fzl743
View details for Web of Science ID 000239761400012
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How far can pragmatic mechanisms take us?
THEORETICAL LINGUISTICS
2006; 32 (3): 307-320
View details for DOI 10.1515/TL.2006.019
View details for Web of Science ID 000244071300002
- Conversational implicatures via general pragmatic pressures Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence edited by Washio, T., Sakurai, A., Nakajima, K., Takeda, H., Tojo, S., Yokoo, M. Berlin: Springer. 2006
- The narrowing acquisition path: From expressive small clauses to declaratives The Syntax of Nonsententials: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives edited by Progovac, L., Paesani, K., Casielles, E., Barton, E. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 2006: 183–201
- The Logic of Conventional Implicatures Oxford University Press. 2005
- Lexicalized intonational meaning University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers Amherst, MA: GLSA.. 2005: 129–146
- Japanese honorifics as emotive definite descriptions Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory edited by Watanabe, K., Young, R. B. 2004: 235–54
- Expressive content as conventional implicature edited by Kadowaki, M., Kawahara, S. 2003: 303–22
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The syntax and semantics of As-parentheticals
NATURAL LANGUAGE & LINGUISTIC THEORY
2002; 20 (3): 623-689
View details for Web of Science ID 000176181900004
- The lexical semantics of parenthetical-as and appositive-which Syntax 2002; 5 (1): 55 - 88
- NELS 33 conference report Glot International 2002
- Model theory and the content of OT constraints Phonology 2002; 19 (3): 361–393
- WCCFL 21 conference report Glot International 2002; 5 (5)
- Proceedings of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics edited by Mikkelsen, L., Potts, C. 2002
- No vacuous quantification constraints in syntax 2001: 451–70
- Three types of transderivational constraint Syntax at Santa Cruz edited by Bhloscaidh, S. M. 2001: 21–40
- (Only) some weak crossover effects repaired Snippets 2000; 1 (3)