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Najoung Kim
[nɑːd͡ʒʌŋ kʰɪm]
Department of Linguistics
& CS (affiliated),
Boston University
Office 808, 665 Comm. Ave,
Boston, MA
najoung@bu.edu
Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by orderedlist
I’m an Assistant Professor at the Department of Linguistics and an Affiliated Faculty at the Department of Computer Science at Boston University. I was a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google DeepMind until very recently. Before that, I was a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Data Science at New York University and a PhD student in the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University, advised by Dr. Paul Smolensky and Dr. Kyle Rawlins. My interests, broadly, are meaning and generalization in human and machine learners. I use computational and experimental linguistic methodologies to explore these areas. Please refer to the Publications section to find out more.
I have a new “For students” section for current and prospective students!
Updates
- Jan 2025: Transformers Struggle to Learn to Search Without In-context Exploration accepted to ICLR.
- Nov 2024: We got a best paper award at Genbench! For Is artificial intelligence still intelligence? LLMs generalize to novel adjective-noun pairs, but don’t mimic the full human distribution (with Hayley Ross and Kate Davidson).
- Nov 2024: I gave a keynote talk at Genbench @ EMNLP!
- Nov 2024: Gave an invited talk at UMass Amherst NLP on entity tracking.
- Oct 2024: Gave an invited talk at Harvard LangCog on neural network models as hypothesis generators.!
- Sep 2024: Two papers accepted to EMNLP!
- Semantic Training Signals Promote Hierarchical Syntactic Generalization in Transformers (with Aditya Yedetore)
- Personas as a Way to Model Truthfulness in Language Models (with Nitish Joshi, Javier Rando, Abulhair Saparov, and He He)
- Sep 2024: Gave an invited talk at the Emerging Generalization Settings Workshop at the Simons Institute on human and machine inductive biases for compositional linguistic generalization.
- Aug 2024: Preprint on neural network learners as hypothesis generators is out! Work with Kanishka Misra.
Education / Professional experience
Current:
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Linguistics
Affiliated faculty, Dept. of Computer Science
Faculty Fellow, Center for Data Science
at Boston University
Visiting Faculty Researcher, Google
2021–2022:
Faculty Fellow, Center for Data Science, New York University
2021
Ph.D., Dept. of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University
May-Nov 2020
Research Intern, Google
Student Researcher, Google
Summer 2019
Research Intern, IBM research
2015–2016
Visiting researcher, NLP*CL Lab, School of Computing, KAIST
2015
M.St. General Linguistics & Comparative Philology
University of Oxford (Ertegun scholar)
2013–2014
Intern developer
Knowledge Extraction/NLP Team, NAVER Corporation
2013
B.A. English Linguistics & Literature
B.A. Linguistics with minor in Computer Science & Engineering
Seoul National University