I’m an Assistant Professor at the Department of Linguistics and an Affiliated Faculty at the Department of Computer Science at Boston University. I am also a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google. 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!

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Updates

• Nov 2023: I was appointed as a CDS Faculty Fellow at BU! 2nd CDS Faculty Fellow position I’ve held :)
• Oct 2023: Presented Abstraction via exemplars? at BUCLD.
• Oct 2023: Invited talks at Penn NLP Seminar on entity tracking and Yale/Google ML Workshop on LLM reasoning.
• Oct 2023: The following papers were accepted to EMNLP 2023.
  • SLOG: A Structural Generalization Benchmark for Semantic Parsing. Bingzhi Li, Lucia Donatelli, Alexander Koller, Tal Linzen, Yuekun Yao, and Najoung Kim.
  • Inverse scaling can become U-shaped. Jason Wei,* Najoung Kim,* Yi Tay, and Quoc V. Le.
• Sep 2023: Invited talk at Virtual Psycholinguistics Forum on category learning in LMs.
• Sep 2023: Inverse scaling paper accepted to TMLR.
• Sep 2023: The following papers were accepted to NeurIPS 2023.
  • Testing the General Deductive Reasoning Capacity of Large Language Models Using OOD Examples. Abulhair Saparov, Richard Yuanzhe Pang, Vishakh Padmakumar, Nitish Joshi, Seyed Mehran Kazemi, Najoung Kim,* and He He.*
  • BoardgameQA: A Dataset for Natural Language Reasoning with Contradictory Information. Mehran Kazemi, Quan Yuan, Deepti Bhatia, Najoung Kim, Xin Xu, Vaiva Imbrasaite, and Deepak Ramachandran.
• July 2023: Entity Tracking in Language Models received the Area Chair Award on the Interpretability & Analysis track at ACL!

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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