I’m an Assistant Professor at the Department of Linguistics and an Affiliated Faculty at the Department of Computer Science at Boston University. Previously, I was a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Data Science at New York University. Even before that, I was 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

• July 2023: Entity Tracking in Language Models received the Area Chair Award on the Interpretability & Analysis track at ACL!
• July 2023: Reasoning or Reciting? Exploring the Capabilities and Limitations of Language Models Through Counterfactual Tasks is on arXiv.
• June 2023: Writeup of the Inverse Scaling Competition and new Google work on defeasible reasoning are on arXiv.
• June 2023: Finding Structure in One Child’s Linguistic Experience has been published in Cognitive Science.
• May 2023: Preprint of Testing the General Deductive Reasoning Capacity of Large Language Models Using OOD Examples is now on arXiv.
• May 2023: The following papers were accepted to ACL 2023.
  • (QA)^2: Question Answering with Questionable Assumptions. Najoung Kim,* Phu Mon Htut,* Sam Bowman, and Jackson Petty
  • Entity Tracking in Language Models. Najoung Kim* and Sebastian Schuster*
  • LAMBADA: Backward Chaining for Automated Reasoning in Natural Language. Seyed Mehran Kazemi, Najoung Kim, Deepti Bhatia, Xin Xu, and Deepak Ramachandran
  • Reconstruction Probing (Findings). Najoung Kim, Jatin Khilnani, Alex Warstadt, and Abed Qaddoumi
• Spring 2023: Invited talks at Harvard (4/7) and Colgate (3/21).
• Mar 2023: Preprints of works done at Google on LLM reasoning and inverse scaling are on arXiv.
• Mar 2023: Inverse Scaling Prize Round 2 results and data are out & was featured on the GPT-4 report.

---

Education / Professional experience

Current:

Assistant Professor, Dept. of Linguistics, 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