Vered Shwartz

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, and a CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute. My research interests focus on natural language processing, with the fundamental goal of building models capable of human-level understanding of natural language. I'm interested in computational semantics and pragmatics, and commonsense reasoning. I'm currently working on learning to uncover implicit meaning, which is abundant in human speech, and on developing machines with advanced reasoning skills.

Before joining UBC, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Prior to that, I did my PhD (2019), M.Sc. (2015), and B.Sc. (2013) in Computer Science in Bar-Ilan University. I was part of the Natural Language Processing lab where I worked on lexical and compositional semantics.


Updates

August 2023 New blog post: Tips for Writing NLP Papers
July 2023 Invited talk at the Workshop on Narrative Understanding, ACL
May 2023 Invited talk at the Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP, EACL
October 2022 I have been appointed as Canada CIFAR AI Chair!
February 2022 In-person (!!) talk at UCSB
January 2022 Invited talk at the MLOps Vancouver Summit
November 2021 Invited talk at the Workshop on Non-Monotonic Reasoning, KR
August 2021 Invited talk at the Multiword Expressions (MWE) workshop, ACL
June 2021 Invited talk at the Natural Logic Meets Machine Learning (NALOMA) workshop, IWCS
June 2021 Invited talk at the Deep Learning Inside Out (DeeLIO) workshop, NAACL

Media

July 2023 CTV News: Dr. AI and personal assistants? Here's what Canada could look like in 2050
June 2023 CBC Radio: about Duolingo (min. 40)
May 2023 CBC Radio: On The Coast, Separating fact from fiction when it comes to ChatGPT
May 2023 Sher-E-Punjab Radio: Dr. Jasbir Romana show, about ChatGPT and education
May 2023 Vancouver Sun: B.C. educators prepare for the 'problems and promise' of AI apps like ChatGPT
May 2023 Business in Vancouver: AI: Artificial intelligence can learn but it’s not ready to teach, experts say
April 2023 Beyond: How to compete with AI and win in the job market
April 2023 Beyond: Could AI help bring about the four-day workweek?
February 2023 CBC News: AI tool raises cheating concerns
January 2023 CTV News: B.C. educators concerned that students may be tempted to cheat through AI, ChatGPT (TV version)
November 2022 UBC Science: A common sense approach to machine learning
October 2022 CIFAR: CIFAR, Amii and the Vector Institute name eight new Canada CIFAR AI Chairs
October 2022 UBC CS News: Dr. Jeff Clune and Dr. Vered Shwartz appointed Canada CIFAR AI Chairs
May 2022 UBC Language Sciences: Good Night at 4 pm?! Time Expressions in Different Cultures: Q&A with Dr. Vered Shwartz
October 2021 UBC CS News: Introducing Dr. Vered Shwartz, Natural Language Processing researcher
May 2021 Freethink: You Can Now Live Forever. (Your AI-Powered Twin, That Is).
March 2021 TWIML AI Podcast: Common Sense Reasoning in NLP
October 2018 Lionbridge.ai: Why Lexical Problems are the Key to NLP?