{{Short description|South Korean computer scientist (born 1977)}}
{{Family name hatnote|Choi|lang=Korean}}
{{Infobox scientist | name = Yejin Choi | native_name = 최예진 | native_name_lang = ko | image = | caption = © John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation–used with permission. | birth_date = {{birth year and age|1977}}| | birth_place = South Korea | alma_mater = Seoul National University (BS)<br />Cornell University (PhD) | workplaces = University of Washington<br />Stony Brook University | thesis_title = Fine-grained opinion analysis : structure-aware approaches | thesis_url = https://ecommons.cornell.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/ab091269-9e69-4ac1-ab10-075740fab0ba/content | thesis_year = 2010 | doctoral_advisor = Claire Cardie | prizes = MacArthur Fellow (2022) | website = {{official website}} | module = {{Infobox Korean name/auto |child=yes | hangul = %최예진 | hanja = }} }}
'''Yejin Choi''' ({{Korean|hangul=최예진}}; born 1977)<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.geekwire.com/2022/university-of-washington-computer-science-professor-yejin-choi-wins-800k-genius-grant/|title=University of Washington computer science professor Yejin Choi wins $800K 'genius grant' – GeekWire|date=12 October 2022 }}</ref> 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.<ref>{{cite web |title=Yejin Choi's Profile |url=https://profiles.stanford.edu/yejin-choi |publisher=Stanford Profiles |access-date=3 September 2025}}</ref> Her research considers natural language processing and computer vision.
== Early life and education == Choi is from South Korea. She attended Seoul National University.<ref>{{Cite web|title=Yejin Choi|url=https://hai.stanford.edu/people/yejin-choi|access-date=2020-10-01|website=Stanford HAI|language=en}}</ref> 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.<ref>{{Cite web|title=Yejin Choi|url=https://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~ychoi/papersbytopic.html|access-date=2020-10-02|website=www3.cs.stonybrook.edu}}</ref> At Stony Brook University Choi developed a statistical technique to identify fake hotel reviews.<ref>{{Cite web|title=Asian American: Yejin Choi Devises Method to Detect Fake Reviews Goldsea|url=https://goldsea.com/Text/index.php?id=13186|access-date=2020-10-02|website=goldsea.com}}</ref>
== Research and career == In 2018 Choi joined the Allen Institute for AI.<ref>{{Cite web|title=Mosaic - People|url=https://mosaic.allenai.org/people|access-date=2020-10-01|website=mosaic.allenai.org|archive-date=2020-11-02|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201102234620/https://mosaic.allenai.org/people|url-status=dead}}</ref> Her research looks to endow computers with a statistical understanding of written language.<ref name=":0">{{Cite web|last=Snyder|first=Alison|title=Trying to give AI some common sense|url=https://www.axios.com/the-quest-to-give-ai-some-common-sense-1521085175-25824f2a-b019-4223-9288-e7810704fd08.html|access-date=2020-10-01|website=Axios|date=15 March 2018 |language=en}}</ref> 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.<ref name=":1">{{Cite web|title=Common Sense Comes to Computers|url=https://www.quantamagazine.org/common-sense-comes-to-computers-20200430/|access-date=2020-10-01|website=Quanta Magazine|date=30 April 2020 |language=en}}</ref> ATOMIC does not make use of linguistic rules, but combines the representations of different languages within a neural network.<ref name=":1" />
In 2020, Choi was endowed with the Brett Helsel Professorship, which she held until she became Chair of Computer Science in 2023.<ref>{{Cite web|title=Endowment for Faculty Excellence {{!}} Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering|url=https://www.cs.washington.edu/supportcse/faculty|access-date=2024-03-08|website=www.cs.washington.edu}}</ref><ref name="chair"/> She has since made use of ''Commonsense Transformers'' (COMET) with Good old fashioned artificial intelligence (GOFAI). The approach combines symbolic reasoning and neural networks.<ref name=":1" /> She has developed computational models that can detect biases in language that work against people from underrepresented groups.<ref name=":2">{{Cite web|title=Anita Borg Award (BECA) - CRA-WP|url=https://cra.org/cra-wp/scholarships-and-awards/awards/beca-award-program/|access-date=2020-10-01|language=en-US|archive-date=2020-12-18|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201218212751/https://cra.org/cra-wp/scholarships-and-awards/awards/beca-award-program/|url-status=dead}}</ref> For example, one study demonstrated that female film characters are portrayed as less powerful than their male counterparts.<ref name=":0" />
In 2023, Choi became The Wissner-Slivka Chair of Computer Science.<ref name="chair">{{cite web | title=The Wissner-Slivka Chair | website=Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering | url=https://www.cs.washington.edu/supportcse/faculty/wissner-slivka_chair | access-date=2024-02-11}}</ref> Choi is also a scientific advisor to French research group Kyutai which is being funded by Xavier Niel, Rodolphe Saadé, Eric Schmidt, and others.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Dillet |first=Romain |date=2023-11-17 |title=Kyutai is a French AI research lab with a $330 million budget that will make everything open source |url=https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/17/kyutai-is-an-french-ai-research-lab-with-a-330-million-budget-that-will-make-everything-open-source/ |access-date=2024-06-16 |website=TechCrunch |language=en-US}}</ref>
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.<ref>{{cite web |title=NVIDIA's Yejin Choi Joins Stanford HAI |url=https://hai.stanford.edu/news/nvidias-yejin-choi-joins-stanford-hai |website=Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence |access-date=3 September 2025}}</ref>
== Awards and honours == * 2013 International Conference on Computer Vision Marr Prize<ref name=":3">{{Cite web|last=Zeng|first=Daniel|title=AI's 10 to Watch|url=https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~yejin/Papers/IEEE-AI-10-to-Watch.pdf|access-date=2020-10-01|website=IEEE}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|title=Yejin Choi (Cornell CS PhD '10) won the Marr Prize for her paper "From Large Scale Image Categorization to Entry-Level Categories" {{!}} Department of Computer Science|url=https://www.cs.cornell.edu/information/news/newsitem787/yejin-choi-cornell-cs-phd-10-won-marr-prize-her-paper-large-scale-image|access-date=2020-10-01|website=www.cs.cornell.edu}}</ref> * 2016 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers AI One to Watch<ref name=":3" /> * 2017 Facebook ParlAI Research Award<ref>{{Cite web|date=2017-10-18|title=Announcing the Winners of the Facebook ParlAI Research Awards|url=https://research.fb.com/blog/2017/10/announcing-the-winners-of-the-facebook-parlai-research-awards/|access-date=2020-10-01|website=Facebook Research|language=en-US}}</ref> * 2018 Anita Borg Early Career Award<ref name=":2" /> * 2020 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Outstanding Paper Award<ref>{{Cite web|title=AAAI Outstanding Paper Award|url=https://aaai.org/Awards/paper.php|access-date=2020-10-01|website=aaai.org}}</ref> * 2021 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems Outstanding Paper Award<ref>{{Cite web|title=NeurIPS Outstanding Paper Award|url=https://blog.neurips.cc/2021/11/30/announcing-the-neurips-2021-award-recipients/|access-date=2024-03-05|website=blog.neurips.cc|date=30 November 2021 }}</ref> * 2021 Association for Computational Linguistics Test-of-time Paper Award<ref>{{Cite web|title=ACL Test-of-time Paper Award|url=https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/announcement-2021-acl-test-time-paper-award|access-date=2024-03-05|website=aclweb.org}}</ref> * 2021 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Longuet-Higgins Prize<ref>{{Cite web|title=CVPR Longuet-Higgins Prize|url=https://cvpr2021.thecvf.com/node/330|access-date=2024-03-05|website=cvpr2021.thecvf.com}}</ref> * 2022 North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Best Paper Award<ref>{{Cite web|title=NAACL Outstanding Paper Award|url=https://2022.naacl.org/blog/best-papers/|access-date=2024-03-05|website=2022.naacl.org|date=29 June 2022 }}</ref> * 2022 International Conference on Machine Learning Outstanding Paper Award<ref>{{Cite web|title=ICML Outstanding Paper Award|url=https://icml.cc/virtual/2022/awards_detail|access-date=2024-03-05|website=icml.cc}}</ref> * 2022 MacArthur Fellowship<ref>{{Cite web|title=An ornithologist, a cellist and a human rights activist: the 2022 MacArthur Fellows|url=https://www.npr.org/2022/10/12/1128352140/2022-macarthur-fellows-genius-grants|access-date=2022-10-12|website=npr.org|date=12 October 2022 |last1=Blair |first1=Elizabeth }}</ref> * 2023 Association for Computational Linguistics Best Paper Award<ref>{{Cite web|title=ACL Outstanding Paper Award|url=https://2023.aclweb.org/program/best_papers/|access-date=2024-03-05|website=2023.aclweb.org}}</ref> * 2023 [https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/ TIME100] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20241227021504/https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/ |date=2024-12-27 }} AI 2023<ref>{{cite web |title=Yejin Choi: The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2023 |url=https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6311114/yejin-choi/ |publisher=Time |access-date=3 September 2025}}</ref> * 2023 Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing Outstanding Paper Award<ref>{{cite web |title=Best Papers - EMNLP 2023 |url=https://2023.emnlp.org/program/best_papers/ |publisher=Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing |access-date=3 September 2025}}</ref> * 2025 Association for Computational Linguistics Outstanding Paper Award<ref>{{cite web |title=Awards - ACL 2025 |url=https://2025.aclweb.org/program/awards/ |website=Association for Computational Linguistics |access-date=3 September 2025}}</ref> * 2025 Association for Computational Linguistics Best Demo Paper Award<ref>{{cite web |title=Awards - ACL 2025 |url=https://2025.aclweb.org/program/awards/#best-demo |publisher=Association for Computational Linguistics |access-date=3 September 2025}}</ref> * 2025 [https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/ TIME100] AI 2025<ref>{{cite web |title=Yejin Choi: The 100 Most Influential People in 2025 |url=https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305803/yejin-choi/ |publisher=Time |access-date=3 September 2025}}</ref>
== Select publications == * {{Cite journal|last1=Ott|first1=Myle|last2=Choi|first2=Yejin|last3=Cardie|first3=Claire|last4=Hancock|first4=Jeffrey T. |date=2011 |title=Finding Deceptive Opinion Spam by Any Stretch of the Imagination |url=https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P11-1032 |journal=Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies |location= Portland, Oregon, USA |publisher=Association for Computational Linguistics |pages=309–319 |arxiv=1107.4557 |s2cid=2510724 |bibcode=2011arXiv1107.4557O |isbn=9781932432879 }} * {{Cite journal|last1=Kulkarni|first1=Girish|last2=Premraj|first2=Visruth|last3=Ordonez|first3=Vicente|last4=Dhar|first4=Sagnik|last5=Li|first5=Siming|last6=Choi|first6=Yejin|last7=Berg|first7=Alexander C.|last8=Berg|first8=Tamara L.|date=2013|title=BabyTalk: Understanding and Generating Simple Image Descriptions|journal=IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence|volume=35|issue=12|pages=2891–2903|doi=10.1109/TPAMI.2012.162|pmid=22848128|bibcode=2013ITPAM..35.2891K |issn=1939-3539|citeseerx=10.1.1.225.5228}} * {{Cite book|last1=Choi|first1=Yejin|last2=Cardie|first2=Claire|last3=Riloff|first3=Ellen|last4=Patwardhan|first4=Siddharth|chapter=Identifying sources of opinions with conditional random fields and extraction patterns |date=2005|title=Proceedings of the conference on Human Language Technology and Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing - HLT '05 |url=https://aclanthology.org/H05-1045 |pages=355–362|location=Morristown, NJ, USA|publisher=Association for Computational Linguistics|doi=10.3115/1220575.1220620|doi-access=free |isbn= }}
== References == {{Reflist}}
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Choi, Yejin}} Category:Living people Category:MacArthur Fellows Category:South Korean women computer scientists Category:South Korean computer scientists Category:21st-century South Korean women scientists Category:Seoul National University alumni Category:Cornell University alumni Category:Stony Brook University faculty Category:University of Washington Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering faculty Category:Natural language processing researchers Category:Artificial intelligence researchers Category:Fellows of the Association for Computational Linguistics Category:21st-century South Korean scientists Category:1977 births