Allen School professor Noah A. Smith is steering AI to be a tool that benefits us all. From introducing new methods to predict linguistic structure to developing open and transparent AI models, Smith, who is also senior director of Natural Language Processing (NLP) Research at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), has helped develop the groundwork for modern NLP research while also pushing the field into the future.
Smith currently serves as the University of Washington vice provost for artificial intelligence overseeing strategy around AI across the University’s mission. As part of the 2026 UW Awards of Excellence, Smith was recently honored with the University Faculty Lecture Award. Since 1976, the award has celebrated faculty, who are widely recognized by their peers, with influential contributions to both their field and society as whole. As part of the award, Smith will deliver the annual University faculty lecture to share his outstanding research and creativity with the greater UW community.
“In my research, I target algorithms that process data encoding language, music, and more, to augment human capabilities,” said Smith, who is also the inaugural Charles and Lisa Simonyi Endowed Chair for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies in the Allen School.
Over the past 25 years, Smith’s research has helped shape the field of NLP by asking how AI systems represent and learn language, how their behavior should be evaluated, and what kinds of infrastructure are needed for open and cumulative science. His early work made influential contributions to structured prediction, multilingual NLP and computational semantics. This includes practical methods for parsing and techniques such as retrofitting, which improves word representations by bringing together expert knowledge with text data. As NLP shifted toward neural and large-scale models, Smith’s work continued to advocate for the importance of rigorous evaluation and transparent scientific practice.
In my research, I target algorithms that process data encoding language, music, and more, to augment human capabilities.
Beyond building the foundations for NLP research, Smith is also interested in guiding the responsible use of AI and its applications to computational social sciences. To that end, Smith has evaluated what AI systems can measure and how model behavior changes across social, cultural and linguistic contexts. For example, he and his collaborators found that AI systems can reproduce or even amplify gender biases in machine translation and racial biases in hate speech detection. Smith has also led the charge in applying NLP to social media analysis, including the development of a large-scale dataset derived from Reddit for text-based recommenders. The goal is to enable researchers to better understand the systems that affect online user interactions.
“Noah’s work is nothing short of groundbreaking. He’s not just a brilliant mind in AI; he’s a force for good, pushing for a future where technology lifts us all up,” said Allen School professor emeritus Oren Etzioni.
Most recently, Smith has focused on developing open AI infrastructure: the models, datasets, benchmarks and pipelines needed to make advanced AI systems scientifically legible. Through efforts such as the fully open language model OLMo, Smith has driven the field toward more accessible AI systems that can be evaluated, improved and governed outside of the confines of industry labs. The success of OLMo led to a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NVIDIA to support the Open Multimodal AI Infrastructure to Accelerate Science (OMAI) project, the first fully open set of AI tools to accelerate scientific discovery — with Smith and Allen School professor and senior director of AI at AI2 Hanna Hajishirzi serving as principal investigator and co-principal investigator, respectively.
The University Faculty Lecture Award is the latest accolade Smith has received celebrating his work. He has been recognized with an Amazon Professorship, NSF CAREER Award and a UW Innovation Award. Smith is a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and he also co-led the UW Sounding Board team which won the inaugural Amazon Alexa Prize.
Read more about the 2026 Awards of Excellence honorees.