Hila Gonen

I am an incoming Assistant Professot of Computer Science at the University of Biritish Columbia, starting August 2025. I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington.

My research interests lie in the intersection of Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. In my research I work towards two main goals: (1) developing algorithms and methods for understanding and controlling the model’s behavior; (2) making cutting-edge language technology available and fair across languages and different socio-demographic groups. I am interested in making models more reliable, consistent and safe, and I also focus on multilingual NLP.

Before joining UW, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Meta AI and at Amazon. Prior to that I did my Ph.D in Computer Science at the NLP lab at Bar Ilan University. I obtained my Ms.C. in Coputer Science from the Hebrew University.

Note for prospective students: I will be recruiting graduate students this coming cycle for the fall of 2025. The deadline is December 15 2024, and you should apply directly to the department.

Recent Updates

Decemner 2024 - Participated as a panelist in The Future of NLP workshop at UBC

December 2024 - I have accepted an offer from CS UBC and will be joining as an Assitant Professor starting August 2025.

November 2024 - Keynote at The 4th Multilingual Representation Learning workshop, EMNLP

October 2024 - Moderating a panel about Safety in AI at The Paul G. Allen School’s 2024 Annual Research Showcase and Open House event

August 2024 - Our new paper Does Liking Yellow Imply Driving a School Bus? Semantic Leakage in Language Models is now available on arXiv

October 2023 - Our paper Demystifying Prompts in Language Models via Perplexity Estimation is accepted at Findings of EMNLP (with a few more papers as well)

August 2023 - Women’s Postdoctoral Career Development Award in Science (Weitzmann Institute of Science)

January 2023 - Best Doctoral Dissertation Award Runner Up, Israeli Association for Artificial Intelligence (IAAI)

October 2022 - Excited to receive the EECS Rising Stars award, attended the workshop at UT Austin

May 2022 - We are honored to get the Best Paper award at the RepL4NLP workshop for our paper “Analyzing Gender Representation in Multilingual Models”