Zae Myung Kim

I am a second year Ph.D. student in the Minnesota NLP group led by Prof. Dongyeop Kang at University of Minnesota Twin Cities.

My primary research interest focuses on learning better representations for longer textual contexts, such as documents, using discourse structures defined in linguistics. As writers carefully design these (hierarchical) structures to convey meaning systematically, they can serve as meaningful learning signals for document-level representation learning. More specifically, I am interested in modeling discourse structures from various frameworks as (hyper)graphs and merging them with other topological structures that can be induced by learning language models with appropriate self-supervision signals.

Before joining the Ph.D. program, I worked as a researcher at NAVER LABS Europe and Papago team at NAVER Korea, where I researched on various topics in neural machine translation (NMT), such as analysis of language-pair-specific multilingual representation, document-level NMT with discourse information, cross-attention-based website translation, and quality estimation for evaluating NMT models.

I received a B.Eng. degree in Computer Science from Imperial College London in 2011. From 2012 to 2013, I served in the Republic of Korea Army Special Forces as an army interpreter. In 2016, I received an M.S. degree in Computer Science from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).

My Ph.D. program is supported by 3M Science and Technology Fellowships.