Yejin Choi


Yejin Choi 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. 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. By the time she had finished the creation of ATOMIC, the language model generative Pre-trained Transformer 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 she became Chair of Computer Science in 2023. She has since made use of Commonsense Transformers with Good old fashioned artificial intelligence. 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.
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.

Awards and honours

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