Freda Shi joined the Cheriton School of Computer Science as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in July 2024. In September 2024 she was named a CIFAR AI Chair and a faculty member at the Vector Institute.
Professor Shi’s research interests are in computational linguistics and natural language processing. She works towards deeper understandings of natural language and the human language processing mechanism, as well as how these insights can inform the design of more efficient, effective, safe and trustworthy NLP systems. She is particularly interested in learning language through grounding, computational multilingualism, and related machine learning aspects.
Her representative work includes grounded syntax and semantics learners, the contextualized bilingual lexicon inducer, and the substructure-based zero-shot cross-lingual dependency parser. She has also worked on searching for evidence of semantics encoded in large language models. Her work has been recognized with best paper nominations at ACL 2019 and 2021, and was supported by a Google PhD Fellowship. She has a PhD in computer science from Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago and a BS in Intelligence Science and Technology from Peking University.
Read the Q&A from Computer Science to learn more.