Yejin Choi – a 2010 Cornell alumna and pioneer in the field of natural language processing – has been awarded a 2022 MacArthur Fellowship, or “genius grant.”
Currently a professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, Choi uses natural language processing to develop artificial intelligence-based systems that can perform commonsense reasoning.
During her doctoral studies at Cornell, Choi was advised by Claire Cardie, professor in the departments of computer science and information science.
“Taking the road less traveled may seem exciting at first, but sustaining this path can be lonely, riddled with numerous roadblocks and disheartening at times,” Choi told Allen School News. “This fellowship will power me up to go ahead and take that adventurous route.”
Her extensive research publication list includes the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, and IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.
Recent honors include co-recipient of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Best Paper Award (2022), the International Conference on Machine Learning Outstanding Paper Award (2022), the Association for Computational Linguistics Test of Time Award (2021), and the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Longuet-Higgins Prize, a test-of-time award (2021).
Administered by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the MacArthur Fellowship is a $800,000, no-strings-attached award given to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential.