Allen School News » Allen School's Jungo Kasai wins IBM Ph.D. Fellowship

Jungo Kasai, a Ph.D. student working with Allen School professor Noah Smith on natural language processing (NLP), has been named a 2020 IBM Ph.D. Fellow. Kasai, who is one of only 24 students from a total of 140 universities around the world to be selected for a fellowship, was recognized in the "Artificial Intelligence/Cognitive Computing" category for his focus on the problem of cross-lingual transfer. Deep learning has made incredible gains for NLP, but most of the research efforts have been focused on the English language. Real-world applications of NLP need to include a diverse set of languages. Kasai's work questions whether or not we can exploit annotated data for "rich" languages like English to improve the accuracy of NLP components for other languages as well.