The TWIML AI Podcast · Wednesday, September 9, 2026
Stanford professor Chris Potts shares how his academic background in linguistics, particularly his PhD research on swearing, unexpectedly led him into Natural Language Processing (NLP). He explains that his desire to analyze the context and intent behind people's language, especially in the context of profanity, drove him to explore corpora and NLP tools.
“My background is in linguistics. Um, linguistics proper, not even natural language processing.”
“I did my PhD on among many other things, swears. What swears are like, why we swear, what information they encode, what kind of taboos exist around them and so forth.”
“So I turned to corpora and from there, you start using NLP toolkits to add structure to those corpora. And then after a few years, maybe you're writing your own tools for doing that work.”