The name “Stanford NLP Group”

The name

The name “Stanford NLP Group” reflected two dispreferences of Chris Manning against the common pattern of using names like “Smith Lab” (perhaps because of his linguistics background?): He disapproved of naming groups after professors, when students are the mainstay of the research of any group and he thought using “lab” was a little silly when actually there was never going to be any laboratory for the group. (Nevertheless, another early name he considered was the Language Technology Research Laboratory (LaTeRaL), reflecting enthusiasm for the more inclusive term “Language Technology” at the time. Because of this, the first two computers of the group, both Sun workstations, were called nlp and lateral. nlp has been replaced several times, but a machine with this name remains our webserver, nlp.stanford.edu.)

Spread of the (University|Place) NLP pattern

The name was normally shortened on web pages, slides, and twitter to “Stanford NLP”. This was not a naming pattern that had previously been used, as far as we were aware. Some existing groups had particular names for their center: CLSP at JHU, IRCS at U. Penn, CMT and later LTI at CMU, UMIST at Manchester, CLEAR at U. Colorado, Boulder. Others were either named after people like “James Allen’s group” or unnamed faculty and their students, such as for Eugene Charniak at Brown or Kathy McKeown at Columbia. In the 21st Century, our naming pattern spread to be the naming pattern of most NLP Groups in the US and internationally:

  • Stanford NLP (2000)
  • Berkeley NLP (2004)
  • MIT NLP
  • UMass NLP
  • Penn NLP
  • UW NLP
  • Princeton NLP
  • Brown NLP
  • OSU NLP
  • USC NLP
  • UCSB NLP
  • DukeNLP
  • Boulder NLP
  • UIUC NLP
  • UBC NLP
  • UPenn NLP
  • Yale NLP
  • McGill NLP
  • HUJI NLP
  • BIU NLP
  • EdinburghNLP
  • AmsterdamNLP
  • GroNLP
  • UCL NLP
  • Cambridge NLP
  • Cardiff NLP
  • MilaNLP
  • MunichNLP
  • Sheffield NLP
  • Warwick NLP
  • SapienzaNLP
  • Helsinki-NLP
  • UGentNLP
  • Uppsala NLP
  • Imperial NLP
  • Manchester NLP
  • TsinghuaNLP
  • WestlakeNLP
  • HKUST NLP
  • GhanaNLP