About me
I’m a PhD student at University of British Columbia and my supervisor is Vered Shwartz. I collaborate with Peter West frequently on multiple projects.
My research focuses on improving the reasoning capabilities of multimodal models by integrating extra-linguistic contexts through transparent and controllable processes. My ultimate goal is to develop a reliable multimodal AI assistant that enhances human decision-making and serves as a valuable tool, without replacing human agency.
Before starting a PhD, I primarily worked with members at Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory (IESL) and IBM Research while receiving a MS in Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. I also spent some time in industry, I worked for Naver in Knowledge Base team for about a year before starting PhD program, and I worked for IBM as an application developer for a year before starting Master’s program.
News
- 1 Paper accepted at ACL 2025
- 1 Paper accepted at INLG 2025
- Awarded $3000 CAD Travel Grant by IVADO to attend the week-long seminar, Safety & Guaranteed LLMs, at the Simons Institute, UC Berkeley
- Severd as a mentor and judge at cmd-f: Western Canada’s largest hackathon for underrepresented genders in tech
- Organized Future of NLP Workshop @ UBC as a pre-NeurIPS event!
- 1 Paper accepted at COLING 2025
- 2 Papers accepted at EMNLP 2024
- 1 Paper accepted at ACL-Findings 2024
- Started an internship with Google Deepmind
- I’m co-organizing Personalization of Generative AI workshop @ EACL 2024 to be held in Malta!
- 3 Papers accepted at EMNLP 2023!
Publications
Infusing Theory of Mind into Socially Intelligent LLM Agents
EunJeong Hwang^, Yuwei Yin^, Giuseppe Carenini, Peter West, Vered Shwartz
Submitted to ICLR 2026
BottleHumor: Self-Informed Humor Explanation using the Information Bottleneck Principle
EunJeong Hwang, Peter West, Vered Shwartz
Long paper @ Findings of ACL 2025
SWI: Speaking with Intent in Large Language Models
Yuwei Yin, EunJeong Hwang, Giuseppe Carenini
Long paper @ INLG 2025
SUMIE: A Synthetic Benchmark for Incremental Entity Summarization
EunJeong Hwang^, Yichao Zhou^, Beliz Gunel, James Bradley Wendt, Sandeep Tata
Long paper @ COLING 2025
Enhancing Incremental Summarization with Structured Representations
EunJeong Hwang, Yichao Zhou, James Bradley Wendt, Beliz Gunel, Nguyen Vo, Jing Xie, Sandeep Tata
Short paper @ Findings of EMNLP 2024
From Local Concepts to Universals: Evaluating the Multicultural Understanding of Vision-Language Models
Mehar Bhatia, Sahithya Ravi, Aditya Chinchure, Eunjeong Hwang, Vered Shwartz
Long paper @ EMNLP 2024
A Graph per Persona: Reasoning about Subjective Natural Language Descriptions
Eunjeong Hwang, Vered Shwartz, Dan Gutfreund, Veronika Thost
Long paper @ Findings of ACL 2024
Knowledge Graph Compression Enhances Diverse Commonsense Generation
Eunjeong Hwang, Veronika Thost, Vered Shwartz, Tengfei Ma
Long paper @ EMNLP 2023
Aligning Language Models to User Opinions
Eunjeong Hwang, Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder, Niket Tandon
Long paper @ Findings of EMNLP 2023
MemeCap: A Dataset for Captioning and Interpreting Memes
Eunjeong Hwang, Vered Shwartz
Long paper @ EMNLP 2023
An Analysis of Virtual Nodes in Graph Neural Networks for Link Prediction
Eunjeong Hwang, Veronika Thost, Shib Sankar Dasgupta, Tengfei Ma
The First Learning on Graphs, 2022 (Spotlight) youtube, code
Event-Event Relation Extraction using Probabilistic Box Embedding
Eunjeong Hwang, Jay-Yoon Lee, Tianyi Yang, Dhruvesh Patel, Dongxu Zhang, Andrew McCallum
ACL-short, 2022 code
Research Experiences
University of British Columbia, 2022.09 - Present
Research Assistant (supervised by Dr. Vered Shwartz)
Google Deepmind, 2024.01 - 2024.06
Research Intern (Host: Yichao Zhou, Beliz Gunel)
MIT-IBM Research, 2023.07 - 2023.12
Research Intern (Host: Veronika Thost, Dan Gutfreund)
Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory (IESL), UMass Amherst, 2020.05 - 2020.08
Research Intern
Work Experiences
Naver, S. Korea, 2021.03 - 2022.06
Software Engineer at Knowledge Base team
IBM, S. Korea, 2018.01 - 2019.04
Application Developer
IBM, S. Korea, 2017.09 - 2017.12
Application Developer Intern
The Development Factory, Australia, 2017.01 - 2017.02
Software Engineer Intern
Teaching Experience
University of Massachussets-Amherst, 2021.02 - 2021.05
Grader at CS685 Graduate Natural Language Processing course (Prof. Brendan O’Connor)
Talks
- [Planned] Invited talk at ResearchTrends.ai (Host: Prof. SeongJoon Oh), Oct. 29, 2025
- Invited talk at Seoul National University’s reading group (Host: Prof. Jayyoon lee), Sep 9, 2024, slides
- Career Panel Discussion at UMass-Amherst (Host: Prof. Andrew McCallum at 696DS, Apr. 2024, May. 2025
- Invited talk at UT Asutin (Host: Prof. Jessy Li at LIN 393), Feb 8, 2024
Services
- Workshop Co-organizer
- Reviewer/Program Committee
- ARR/ACL/EMNLP (2024,2025), COLM (2025), *SEM 2024, CIKM (2024, 2025)
- The First Workshop on Data Contamination (CONDA 2024)
- AAAI Workshop on Responsible Language Models (ReLM 2024)
- Departmental Service
- Vector Institute Scholarship Adjudication Committee 2025-2026
- UBC CS: Admission Committee Member for the CSE Ph.D. Program (2022)
- Mentoring
- Mentor and judge @ cmd-f: Western Canada’s largest hackathon for underrepresented genders in tech (2025)
Awards
President’s Academic Excellence Initiative PhD Award, UBC, 2022.09-
International Tuition Award, UBC, 2022.09-
Faculty of Science PhD Tuition Award, UBC, 2022.09-