Wendy Grace Lehnert is an American computer scientist specializing in natural language processing and known for her pioneering use of machine learning in natural language processing. She is a professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Lehnert earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Portland State University in 1972, and a master's degree from Yeshiva University in 1974. She became a student of Roger Schank at Yale University, completing her Ph.D. there in 1977 with a dissertation on The Process of Question Answering, and was hired by Yale as an assistant professor. She moved to the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1982. At Amherst, her doctoral students have included Claire Cardie and Ellen Riloff. She retired in 2011.
Lehnert has written both scholarly and popular books on computing, including:
In 1991, Lehnert was elected as an AAAI Fellow.