I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the
University of British Columbia,
and a CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute.
My research interests focus on natural language processing,
with the fundamental goal of building models capable of human-level understanding of natural
language.
I'm interested in computational semantics and pragmatics, and commonsense reasoning.
I'm currently working on learning to uncover implicit meaning, which is abundant in human speech,
developing machines with advanced reasoning skills, multimodal models, and culturally-aware NLP models.
Before joining UBC, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Allen
Institute
for AI (AI2) and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer
Science & Engineering at the University of
Washington.
Prior to that, I did my PhD (2019), M.Sc. (2015), and B.Sc. (2013) in Computer Science in Bar-Ilan
University. I was part of the Natural Language Processing
lab
where I worked on lexical and compositional semantics.
Updates
| February 2025 | My nonfiction book Lost in Automatic Translation is coming out this summer! |
| December 2024 | Invited talk at the Workshop on Large Foundation Models for Educational Assessment, NeurIPS |
| August 2024 | Invited talk at the Human-Centered Large Language Modeling Workshop, ACL |
| June 2024 | Invited talk at the Workshop on Figurative Language Processing, NAACL |
| May 2024 | Invited talk at the Workshop on Reference, Framing, and Perspective, LREC-COLING |
| August 2023 | New blog post: Tips for Writing NLP Papers |
| July 2023 | Invited talk at the Workshop on Narrative Understanding, ACL |
| May 2023 | Invited talk at the Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP, EACL |
| October 2022 | I have been appointed as Canada CIFAR AI Chair! |
| February 2022 | In-person (!!) talk at UCSB |
| January 2022 | Invited talk at the MLOps Vancouver Summit |
| November 2021 | Invited talk at the Workshop on Non-Monotonic Reasoning, KR |
| August 2021 | Invited talk at the Multiword Expressions (MWE) workshop, ACL |
| June 2021 | Invited talk at the Natural Logic Meets Machine Learning (NALOMA) workshop, IWCS |
| June 2021 | Invited talk at the Deep Learning Inside Out (DeeLIO) workshop, NAACL |