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Photo credit:
Bruce Hemingway



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Yejin Choi

Brett Helsel Professor
Office: 578 Allen Center
Fax: 206-685-2969
email: yejin@cs.washington.edu
    Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering
    University of Washington
    Box 352350
    185 E Stevens Way NE
    Seattle, WA 98195-2350
   
    Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
    2157 N Northlake Way, Suite 110
    Seattle, WA 98103


News:

- Featured by NY Times on Delphi
- Outstanding Paper Award at NeurIPS 2021
- Test of Time Award at ACL 2021
- Longuet Higgins Prize (test of time award) at CVPR 2021
- Promoted to a full professor as of Apr 2021, the new title effective on Sep 2021
- Endowed with the Brett Helsel Career Development Professorship (2020 - 2023)
- Won the AAAI Outstanding Paper Award 2020
- Featured by Quanta Magazine --- 🤖"Common Sense Comes Closer to Computers"🤖
- Our UW Sounding Board team is the winnner of the Alexa Prize!
- Our UW team (with Pooja, Max, Ari) won the Facebook ParlAI award!
- I'm serving as:
   a program chair for ICLR 2022,
   an editor for Computational Linguistics,
   a senior area chair for EMNLP 2018,
   an area chair for ICLR 2019, ACL 2020
   and as a PC member for ACL Rolling, EMNLP, CVPR, ICLR, NIPS, CoNLL, RoboNLP, WiNLP, and JNLE.
- Named among ``IEEE AI's 10 to Watch'', selected by the IEEE Intelligent Systems once every two years.
- A recepient of Borg Early Career Award (BECA).

Recent Talks (2018 - 2022):

Sep 2022 Keynote at Interspeech
??? 2022 Talk at Tel-Aviv University
May 2022 Keynote at ...
May 2022 Keynote at the ACL Workshop on Deep Learning Inside Out (DeeLIO): Knowledge Extraction and Integration for Deep Learning Architectures
Mar 2022 Distinguished Lecture at Microsoft Research
Mar 2022 Keynote at the AAAI Spring Symposium on Ethical Computing: Metrics for Measuring AI’s Proficiency and Competency for Ethical Reasoning
Mar 2022 Distinguished Lecture at Max Planck Institute
Feb 2022 Keynote at WSDM
Dec 2021 Keynote at the NeurIPS workshop on Efficient Natural Language and Speech Processing (ENLSP)
Dec 2021 Keynote at the NeurIPS workshop on CtrlGen: Controllable Generative Modeling in Language and Vision
Nov 2021 Talk at the SNU AI Policy Initiative, SAPI
Nov 2021 Talk at the University of Texas Austin
Nov 2021 Keynote at the EMNLP workshop on Novel Ideas in Learning-to-Learn through Interaction (NILLI)
Oct 2021 Panel at Microsoft Research Summit on Large-scale Neural Platform Models: Opportunities, Concerns, and Directions
Oct 2021 Colloquium talk at UPenn
Oct 2021 Talk at Georgia Tech: "Knowledge is Power: Symbolic Knowledge Distillation, Commonsense Morality, and Multimodal Script Knowledge"
Aug 2021 Keynote at the Stanford FORUM Workshop on Universal Models: "David V.S. Goliath: the Art of Leaderboarding in the Era of Extreme-Scale Neural Models" with the recorded talk →here and the panel →here
Aug 2021 Panel at the ACL workshop on NLP for Positive Impact
Jul 2021 Distinguished Lecture at Sony
Jun 2021 Keynote at the NAACL workshop on Visually Grounded Interaction and Language (ViGIL)
Jun 2021 Keynote at the NAACL workshop on Advances in Language and Vision Research (ALVR)
May 2021 Keynote at the ICLR workshop on Workshop on Enormous Language Models (WELM): "David V.S. Goliath in the Era of Gigantic Neural Networks"
May 2021 Keynote at ICLR: "Commonsense AI: Myth and Truth"
Apr 2021 Keynote at WebConf (formally WWW)
Mar 2021 Talk at Facebook AI
Feb 2021 Keynote at the 1st ELLIS NLP Symposium with a recorded talk →here
Feb 2021 Keynote at the AAAI Workshop on Commonsense Knowledge Graphs
Jan 2021 Teaching at the ALPS Winter School with recorded lectures →here
Jan 2021 Talk at UCL Dark Lab with a recorded talk →here
Dec 2020 Panel at AI Debate 2 at Montreal.ai with a recorded talk →here (my 3 min pitch) and →here (the whole 3.5 hr debate)
Dec 2020 Keynote at the Neurips Workshop on Self-Supervised Learning -- Theory and Practice
Dec 2020 Keynote at the Neurips Workshop on Dataset Curation and Security
Dec 2020 Talk at ByteDance
Nov 2020 Keynote at the AAAI Fall Symposium on Abstraction and Analogy
Nov 2020 Talk at the Distinguished Lecture Series at NSF CISE on "Intuitive Reasoning as (Un)supervised Neural Generation"
Nov 2020 Talk at MIT CSAIL Embodied Intelligence with a recorded talk →here
Oct 2020 Keynote at the Fall Stanford Human-Centered AI (HAI) Conference on Triangulating Intelligence: Melding Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI with a recorded talk →here (from 28:00 to 53:00)
Oct 2020 Distinguished Lecture (Department Colloquium) at Columbia University
Oct 2020 Colloquium at CMU LTI with a recorded talk →here
Oct 2020 Colloquium at University of Maryland CLIP
Oct 2020 Keynote at the Amazon ML Conference 2020
Oct 2020 Talk at Amazon AI
Sep 2020 Talk at SNU Data Science
Aug 2020 Keynote at the ECCV Workshop on Video Turing Test (VTT): Toward Human-Level Video Story Understanding with a pre-recorded talk →here
Aug 2020 Keynote at CIFAR Deep Learning Seminar Summer School with a pre-recorded talk →here
Jul 2020 ACL Tutorial on Commonsense with a recorded talk →here
Jul 2020 Keynote at the ACL Workshop on Multimodal Language
Jul 2020 Keynote at the ACL Workshop on Fact Extraction and Verification (FEVER) with a recorded talk →here
Jun 2020 CVPR tutorial on Neuro-Symbolic Visual Reasoning and Program Synthesis with a recorded talk →here
Jun 2020 Keynote at the Workshop on Symbolic-Neural Learning (SNL-2020) --- cancelled until 2021
Apr 2020 Panel at the ICLR Workshop on Bridging Cognitive Science and AI (BAICS)
Feb 2020 Keynote at the AAAI Workshop on Statistical Relational AI (StarAI)
Dec 2019 Keynote at the Neurips Workshop on KR2ML - Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Meets Machine Learning
Dec 2019 Keynote at the Neurips Workshop on Learning with Rich Experience: Integration of Learning Paradigms
Nov 2019 Keynote at the Natural Language, Dialog and Speech (NDS) Symposium @ the New York Academy of Sciences
Nov 2019 Keynote at the EMNLP Workshop on COmmonsense INference in NLP (COIN)
Nov 2019 Keynote at the ICCV Workshop on Extreme Vision Modeling
Nov 2019 Keynote at the ICCV Workshop on Scene Graph Representation and Learning
Nov 2019 Keynote at the ICCV Workshop on Closing the Loop Between Vision and Language (CLVL)
Oct 2019 Talk at UIUC   +   TTIC   +   Northwestern
Aug 2019 Keynote at the ACL Workshop on Conversational AI (ConvAI): "The Curious Case of Neural Conversation Degeneration"
July 2019 Panel at MSR Faculty Summit on the Future of Work   +   Keynote at KCCV
Jun 2019 Keynote at the NAACL Workshop onNeuralGen : "The Enigma of Neural Text Degeneration as the First Defense to Neural Fake News."
May 2019 Keynote at AKBC   +   Elemental Cognition   +   IBM Research: "From Atomic to Comet: Commonsense AKBC."
July 2018 Keynote at the ACL Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP
July 2018 Keynote at LxMLS Lisbon Machine Learning School
Jun 2018 Keynote at the CVPR Workshop on Visual Question Answering
Jun 2018 Keynote at the NAACL Workshop on Generalization in Deep Learning: ``Why NLU Doesn't Generalize Well to NLG.''
Apr 2018 Keynote at NW-NLP: recorded talk →here
Feb 2018 Keynote at AAAI

Research Interests:

My primary research interests are in the fields of Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, with broader interests in Computer Vision and Digital Humanities.

Language and X ∈ {vision, knowledge, world, mind, society...} : Intelligent communication requires the ability to read between the lines and to reason beyond what is said explicitly. My recent research has been under two broad themes: (i) learning the contextual, grounded meaning of language from various contexts in which language is used — both physical (e.g., visual) and abstract (e.g., social, cognitive), and (ii) learning the background knowledge about how the world works, latent in large-scale multimodal data. More specifically, my research interests include:

Recent Preprints:

Recent Peer-Reviewed Publications (2016 - 2022):

Selected Publications (2011 - 2015):

Full List of Publications:

Recent Teaching:

xlab:

Short Bio:

    Yejin Choi is Brett Helsel professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington and also a senior research manager at AI2 overseeing the project Mosaic. Her research investigates a wide variety problems across NLP and AI including commonsense knowledge and reasoning, neural language (de-)generation, language grounding with vision and experience, and AI for social good. She is a co-recipient of the ACL Test of Time award in 2021, the CVPR Longuet-Higgins Prize (test of time award) in 2021, a NeurIPS Outstanding Paper Award in 2021, the AAAI Outstanding Paper Award in 2020, the Borg Early Career Award (BECA) in 2018, the inaugural Alexa Prize Challenge in 2017, IEEE AI's 10 to Watch in 2016, and the ICCV Marr Prize (best paper award) in 2013. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Cornell University and BS in Computer Science and Engineering at Seoul National University in Korea.

Personal:

    Scuba!