Heng Ji is a computer scientist who works on information extraction and

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...

. She is well known for her work on joined

named entity recognition Named-entity recognition (NER) (also known as (named) entity identification, entity chunking, and entity extraction) is a subtask of information extraction that seeks to locate and classify named entities mentioned in unstructured text into pr ...

and relation extraction, as well as for her work on cross-document event extraction. She has been coordinating the popular

NIST The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into physical s ...

TAC

Knowledge Base In computer science, a knowledge base (KB) is a set of sentences, each sentence given in a knowledge representation language, with interfaces to tell new sentences and to ask questions about what is known, where either of these interfaces migh ...

Population task since 2010. She has been recognised as one of AI's 10 to watch by

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) organization, 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE ...

Intelligent Systems in 2013, and has won multiple awards, including a

NSF Career Award The National Science Foundation CAREER award is the most prestigious award presented by the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States Federal Government to support junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through rese ...

in 2009,

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

Research awards in 2009 and 2014, and an

IBM Watson IBM Watson is a computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language. It was developed as a part of IBM's DeepQA project by a research team, led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's fou ...

Faculty Award in 2012.

Education

Heng Ji obtained a Bachelor's and master's degree in

Computational Linguistics Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, computational linguistics ...

from

Tsinghua University Tsinghua University (THU) is a public university in Haidian, Beijing, China. It is affiliated with and funded by the Ministry of Education of China. The university is part of Project 211, Project 985, and the Double First-Class Constructio ...

. She subsequently obtained a MSc, then PhD in

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

from

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private university, private research university in New York City, New York, United States. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded in 1832 by Albert Gallatin as a Nondenominational ...

in 2008 under the supervision of Ralph Grishman. Her PhD thesis was on the topic of information extraction, with a particular focus on joint training of multiple components in the information extraction pipeline, as well as cross-lingual learning.

Career

Upon graduating with a PhD from

, Ji took up a position as assistant professor at

Queens College, City University of New York Queens College (QC) is a public college in the New York City borough of Queens. Part of the City University of New York system, Queens College occupies an campus primarily located in Flushing. Queens College was established in 1937 and offe ...

, where she founded the BLENDER Lab, which focuses on research on cross-lingual, cross-documents, cross-media information extraction and fusion. In 2013, she joined

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (; RPI) is a private university, private research university in Troy, New York, United States. It is the oldest technological university in the English-speaking world and the Western Hemisphere. It was establishe ...

as an Edward P. Hamilton Development Chair and Tenured associate professor in Computer Science. Since 2019, she has been a full professor at the

University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United States. Established in 1867, it is the f ...

, as well as an

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology company * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek myth ...

Scholar.

Research

Heng Ji works in the area of

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

and information extraction. She has published over 300 peer-reviewed research papers. Her work is published in the proceedings of

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

conferences, including the Annual Meeting of the

Association for Computational Linguistics The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is a scientific and professional organization for people working on natural language processing. Its namesake conference is one of the primary high impact conferences for natural language proce ...

The Web Conference The ACM Web Conference (formerly known as International World Wide Web Conference, abbreviated as WWW) is a yearly international academic conference on the topic of the future direction of the World Wide Web. The first conference of many was he ...

, and the ACM Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD). Ji is a leading researcher in information extraction, having coordinated the popular

TAC

Population shared task since 2010. She is most recognised for her work on modelling interactions between subtasks in information extraction, which was also the topic of her PhD thesis, and for her work on event detection using cross-document signals.

Selected honors and distinctions

*2009

Research Award *2012

Faculty Award *2013

AI's 10 to Watch *2014

Research Award *2016

World Economic Forum The World Economic Forum (WEF) is an international non-governmental organization, international advocacy non-governmental organization and think tank, based in Cologny, Canton of Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded on 24 January 1971 by German ...

, 'Young Scientist' *2017

, 'Young Scientist' *2020 Annual Meeting of the

, best demonstration paper

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ji, Heng Living people Chinese computer scientists Natural language processing researchers New York University alumni Tsinghua University alumni Chinese women computer scientists Year of birth missing (living people) Data miners