Christopher Potts

Christopher Potts (commonly known as Chris Potts) is an American linguist and cognitive scientist. He is Professor and Chair of the Department of Linguistics and, by courtesy, Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. He is best known for work in formal semantics and pragmatics, including an influential multidimensional approach to expressivity, conventional implicature, and their kin. His more recent work develops probabilistic models of pragmatic inference that bridge theoretical and experimental approaches.

He gave plenary talks at the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, and the 2025 convention of the Linguistics Society of America.