Jocelyn Qiaochu Chen
About
Appointed Canada CIFAR AI Chair – 2026
Jocelyn’s research sits at the intersection of programming languages, formal methods, and natural language processing. Her work focuses on neurosymbolic approaches to programming: combining the structure of programming languages with the flexibility of modern machine learning, particularly large language models. She builds systems that generate and manipulate code from rich specifications such as natural language, examples, images, and formal constraints. A central theme in her research is how symbolic structure—types, specifications, proof systems, and program transformations—can guide large language models, while LLMs in turn reshape how we think about code generation and programming abstractions. Her research has been published in top venues including PLDI, OOPSLA, NeurIPS, and ACL.
Awards
- Rising Stars in EECS, Georgia Institute of Technology (2023)
- Provost’s Graduate Excellence Fellowship, The University of Texas at Austin (2018 - 2022)
Relevant Publications
- Chen, Q., Banerjee, A., Demiralp, Ç., Durrett, G., & Dillig, I. (2023). Data Extraction via Semantic Regular Expression Synthesis. Reproduction Package for Article “Data Extraction via Semantic Regular Expression Synthesis,” 7(OOPSLA2), 287:1848-287:1877. https://doi.org/10.1145/3622863
- Chen, Q., Lamoreaux, A., Wang, X., Durrett, G., Bastani, O., & Dillig, I. (2021). Web question answering with neurosymbolic program synthesis. Proceedings of the 42nd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, PLDI 2021, 328–343. https://doi.org/10.1145/3453483.3454047
- Barnaby, C., Chen, Q., Ramalingam, R., Bastani, O., & Dillig, I. (2025). Active Learning for Neurosymbolic Program Synthesis. Proc. ACM Program. Lang., 9(OOPSLA2), 324:1455-324:1483. https://doi.org/10.1145/3763102
- Ye, X., Chen, Q., Dillig, I., & Durrett, G. (2023). SatLM: Satisfiability-aided language models using declarative prompting. In A. Oh, T. Naumann, A. Globerson, K. Saenko, M. Hardt, & S. Levine (Eds.), Advances in neural information processing systems (Vol. 36, pp. 45548–45580). Curran Associates, Inc. https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2023/file/8e9c7d4a48bdac81a58f983a64aaf42b-Paper-Conference.pdf
- Chen, Q., Wang, X., Ye, X., Durrett, G., & Dillig, I. (2020). Multi-modal synthesis of regular expressions. Proceedings of the 41st ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, PLDI 2020, 487–502. https://doi.org/10.1145/3385412.3385988