Vered Shwartz
Appointment
Canada CIFAR AI Chair
Pan-Canadian AI Strategy
About
Appointed Canada CIFAR AI Chair – 2022
Vered Shwartz is is a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute. She is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) and the University of Washington.
Shwartz’s research focuses on natural language processing, with the fundamental goal of building models capable of human-level understanding of natural language. Her research involves different problems in computational semantics and pragmatics, and commonsense reasoning. In particular, she is working on learning to uncover implicit meaning (“reading between the lines”), which is abundant in human speech, and on developing machines with advanced reasoning skills, multimodal models, and culturally-aware NLP models.
Awards
- Mitacs Accelerate, 2024
- Microsoft Accelerate Foundation Models Research Program, 2023
- AI2 Research Gift, The Allen Institute for AI (AI2), 2021
- The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Postdoctoral Award for Women in Mathematical and Computing Sciences, The Schmidt Family Foundation, 2019
- AI2 Key Scientific Challenges Program, The Allen Institute for AI (AI2), 2017
- Clore Foundation Scholarship for Excellent Ph.D. Students, Clore Israel Foundation, 2017
Relevant Publications
- Ravi, S., Huber, P., Shrivastava, A., Sagar, A., Aly, A., Shwartz, V., & Einolghozati, A. (2024). Small but funny: A feedback-driven approach to humor distillation. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).
- Hwang, E., Shwartz, V., Gutfreund, D., & Thost, V. (2024). A graph per persona: Reasoning about subjective natural language descriptions. In Findings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).
- Coil, J., & Shwartz, V. (2023). From chocolate bunny to chocolate crocodile: Do language models understand noun compounds? In Findings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).
- Ravi, S., Tanner, C., Ng, R., & Shwartz, V. (2023). What happens before and after: Multi-event commonsense in event coreference resolution. In Proceedings of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL).
- Shwartz, V. (2022). Good night at 4 pm?! Time expressions in different cultures. In Findings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).