The culture of the Stanford NLP Group

If we may pat ourselves on the back a little, the Stanford NLP Group has generally been recognized for its positive culture as a group.

Some of the central attributes that we have emphasized that are important to that culture are:

• Maintain interdisciplinarity
• Have active mentorship at every level
• Implement ideas and make them available to others to achieve impact
• Invest actively in community maintenance

In recent years, Dan Jurafsky in particular has assumed the central role in maintaining Stanford NLP Group culture – and ordering our food. But beyond the faculty, we have benefited enormously from particular students over the years who have devoted a lot of time to maintaining and building the cohesion of the NLP Group.

Since almost the beginning, Stanford NLP has had students in computer science and linguistics, and also occasionally students from psychology, electrical engineering, education, and computational and mathematical engineering. While CS students have dominated numerically, we have always tried to give equal status and opportunities to everyone. We believe that the CS students have always benefited from their broader cross-disciplinary exposure in the group, while non-CS students usually benefit from the AI mindset of producing conference papers. 😊 Even when other universities have students in various departments working on NLP, it is rare that they have a unified group like ours.