Yejin Choi

Yejin Choi (born 1977) is Wissner-Slivka Chair of Computer Science at the University of Washington. Her research considers natural language processing and computer vision.

Early life and education
Choi is from South Korea. She attended Seoul National University. After earning a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Choi moved to the United States, where she joined Cornell University as a graduate student. There she worked with Claire Cardie on natural language processing. After earning her doctorate, Choi joined Stony Brook University as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science. At Stony Brook University Choi developed a statistical technique to identify fake hotel reviews.

Research and career
In 2018 Choi joined the Allen Institute for AI. Her research looks to endow computers with a statistical understanding of written language. She became interested in neural networks and their application in artificial intelligence. She started to assemble a knowledge base that became known as the atlas of machine commonsense (ATOMIC). By the time she had finished the creation of ATOMIC, the language model generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2) had been released. ATOMIC does not make use of linguistic rules, but combines the representations of different languages within a neural network.

In 2020, Choi was endowed with the Brett Helsel Professorship, which she held until her became Chair of Computer Science in 2023. She has since made use of Commonsense Transformers (COMET) with Good old fashioned artificial intelligence (GOFAI). The approach combines symbolic reasoning and neural networks. She has developed computational models that can detect biases in language that work against people from underrepresented groups. For example, one study demonstrated that female film characters are portrayed as less powerful than their male counterparts.

In 2023, Choi became The Wissner-Slivka Chair of Computer Science. Choi is also a scientific advisor to French research group Kyutai which is being funded by Xavier Niel, Rodolphe Saadé, Eric Schmidt, and others.

Awards and honours

 * 2013 International Conference on Computer Vision Marr Prize
 * 2016 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers AI One to Watch
 * 2017 Facebook ParlAI Research Award
 * 2018 Anita Borg Early Career Award
 * 2020 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Outstanding Paper Award
 * 2021 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems Outstanding Paper Award
 * 2021 Association for Computational Linguistics Test-of-time Paper Award
 * 2021 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Longuet-Higgins Prize
 * 2022 North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Best Paper Award
 * 2022 International Conference on Machine Learning Outstanding Paper Award
 * 2022 MacArthur Fellowship
 * 2023 Association for Computational Linguistics Best Paper Award