Yejin Choi
South Korean computer scientist (born 1977)
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Yejin Choi (Korean: 최예진; born 1977)[1] is the Dieter Schwarz Foundation Professor and Senior Fellow at the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) respectively.[2] Her research considers natural language processing and computer vision.
Cornell University (PhD)
Stony Brook University
Yejin Choi | |
|---|---|
최예진 | |
| Born | 1977 (age 48–49) |
| Alma mater | Seoul National University (BS) Cornell University (PhD) |
| Awards | MacArthur Fellow (2022) |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | University of Washington Stony Brook University |
| Thesis | Fine-grained opinion analysis : structure-aware approaches (2010) |
| Claire Cardie | |
| Korean name | |
| Hangul | 최예진 |
| RR | Choe Yejin |
| MR | Ch'oe Yejin |
| Website | Official website  |
Early life and education
Choi is from South Korea. She attended Seoul National University.[3] 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.[4] At Stony Brook University Choi developed a statistical technique to identify fake hotel reviews.[5]
Research and career
In 2018 Choi joined the Allen Institute for AI.[6] Her research looks to endow computers with a statistical understanding of written language.[7] 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.[8] ATOMIC does not make use of linguistic rules, but combines the representations of different languages within a neural network.[8]
In 2020, Choi was endowed with the Brett Helsel Professorship, which she held until she became Chair of Computer Science in 2023.[9][10] She has since made use of Commonsense Transformers (COMET) with Good old fashioned artificial intelligence (GOFAI). The approach combines symbolic reasoning and neural networks.[8] She has developed computational models that can detect biases in language that work against people from underrepresented groups.[11] For example, one study demonstrated that female film characters are portrayed as less powerful than their male counterparts.[7]
In 2023, Choi became The Wissner-Slivka Chair of Computer Science.[10] Choi is also a scientific advisor to French research group Kyutai which is being funded by Xavier Niel, Rodolphe Saadé, Eric Schmidt, and others.[12]
In 2025, Stanford HAI announced the appointment of Choi as senior fellow and the Dieter Schwarz Foundation HAI Professor and Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University.[13]
Awards and honours
- 2013 International Conference on Computer Vision Marr Prize[14][15]
- 2016 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers AI One to Watch[14]
- 2017 Facebook ParlAI Research Award[16]
- 2018 Anita Borg Early Career Award[11]
- 2020 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Outstanding Paper Award[17]
- 2021 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems Outstanding Paper Award[18]
- 2021 Association for Computational Linguistics Test-of-time Paper Award[19]
- 2021 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Longuet-Higgins Prize[20]
- 2022 North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Best Paper Award[21]
- 2022 International Conference on Machine Learning Outstanding Paper Award[22]
- 2022 MacArthur Fellowship[23]
- 2023 Association for Computational Linguistics Best Paper Award[24]
- 2023 TIME100 Archived 2024-12-27 at the Wayback Machine AI 2023[25]
- 2023 Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing Outstanding Paper Award[26]
- 2025 Association for Computational Linguistics Outstanding Paper Award[27]
- 2025 Association for Computational Linguistics Best Demo Paper Award[28]
- 2025 TIME100 AI 2025[29]
Select publications
- Ott, Myle; Choi, Yejin; Cardie, Claire; Hancock, Jeffrey T. (2011). "Finding Deceptive Opinion Spam by Any Stretch of the Imagination". Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. Portland, Oregon, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics: 309–319. arXiv:1107.4557. Bibcode:2011arXiv1107.4557O. ISBN 9781932432879. S2CID 2510724.
- Kulkarni, Girish; Premraj, Visruth; Ordonez, Vicente; Dhar, Sagnik; Li, Siming; Choi, Yejin; Berg, Alexander C.; Berg, Tamara L. (2013). "BabyTalk: Understanding and Generating Simple Image Descriptions". IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. 35 (12): 2891–2903. Bibcode:2013ITPAM..35.2891K. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.225.5228. doi:10.1109/TPAMI.2012.162. ISSN 1939-3539. PMID 22848128.
- Choi, Yejin; Cardie, Claire; Riloff, Ellen; Patwardhan, Siddharth (2005). "Identifying sources of opinions with conditional random fields and extraction patterns". Proceedings of the conference on Human Language Technology and Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing - HLT '05. Morristown, NJ, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 355–362. doi:10.3115/1220575.1220620.