Eunjeong Hwang

Eunjeong Hwang

South Korean. PhD @ UBC and MS @ UMass Amherst. Major in Computer Science. Interested in Natural Language Processing.

About me

I’m a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, advised by Vered Shwartz. I frequently collaborate with Peter West and other fantastic colleagues on multiple projects.

My research focuses on making reasoning AI models interpreatable and adaptable by understanding implicit contexts that exist across multiple modalities in diverse situations. My ultimate goal is to develop a reliable AI assistant that enhances human decision-making and serves as a valuable tool, without replacing human agency.

Before starting my PhD, I primarily worked with members of the Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory (IESL) and IBM Research while receiving an MS in Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I also spent time in industry: I worked on the Knowledge Base team at Naver for about a year before starting my PhD, and I worked at IBM as an application developer for about a year before starting my Master’s program.

You can find (sometimes more) detailed and up-to-date information in my CV:
Full CV (PDF)

News

Publications

Agents of Chaos
Natalie Shapira, Chris Wendler, …, EunJeong Hwang, …, Tomer Ullman, David Bau
Arxiv Preprint
My contribution: First to identify and wrote Owner Identity Spoofing vulnerability (Chapter 8) and wrote the Related Work section on Theory of Mind limitations in agentic systems.

[Watch Before You Answer: Learning from Visually Grounded Post-Training]
Yuxuan Zhang, EunJeong Hwang, Yiming Jia, Penghui Du, Peter West, Kelsey R Allen
Submitted to ECCV 2026

Infusing Theory of Mind into Socially Intelligent LLM Agents
EunJeong Hwang^, Yuwei Yin^, Giuseppe Carenini, Peter West, Vered Shwartz
Submitted to ACL 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 Experience

  • University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada (2022.09–Present)
    Research Assistant (supervised by Prof. Vered Shwartz). Working on implicit social reasoning, mental simulation in LLMs, and aligning models with user beliefs and preferences.
  • Megagon Labs, Mountain View, CA (2026.04–2026.06)
    Research Intern (Hosts: Hannah Kim, Dan Zhang).
  • OpenAI, Remote (2026.03)
    Red-teaming member (contract). Participated in an internal red-teaming sprint.
  • Google DeepMind, Remote (2024.01–2024.06)
    Research Intern (Hosts: Yichao Zhou, Beliz Gunel). Worked on incremental structured summaries and resolving knowledge conflicts.
  • MIT-IBM Research, Boston, MA (2023.07–2023.12)
    Research Intern (Hosts: Veronika Thost, Dan Gutfreund). Worked on reasoning about subjective opinions using graph structures.
  • Allen Institute for AI (AI2), Remote (2023.04–2023.12)
    Research Collaborator (Mentors: Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder, Niket Tandon). Worked on aligning language models to user opinions.
  • UMass Amherst–IBM, Remote (2021.02–2021.10)
    Graduate Student Researcher (Mentors: Veronika Thost, Tengfei Ma). Investigated virtual node–augmented GNNs for link prediction.
  • Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory (IESL), UMass Amherst (2020.01–2021.08)
    Graduate Student Researcher (Mentors: Jay-Yoon Lee, Michael Boratko). Worked on probabilistic box embeddings for relation extraction and QA.

Work Experience

  • Naver, Seongnam, Korea (2021.03–2022.06)
    Software Engineer, Knowledge Base team. Built knowledge graphs over regional entities (restaurants, festivals, exhibitions) and deployed search/expansion systems (e.g., Neo4j-backed query expansion, weather-related search).
  • IBM, Seoul, Korea (2018.01–2019.04)
    Application Developer. Worked on financial text mining and surveillance systems for clients including Shinhan Financial Group, Standard Chartered Bank, and Hanwha.
  • IBM, Seoul, Korea (2017.09–2017.12)
    Application Developer Intern. Designed database schemas and implemented learning platform features aligned with UX designs.
  • The Development Factory, Australia (2017.01–2017.02)
    Software Engineer Intern.

Teaching Experience

  • UBC, CPSC 532V – Commonsense Reasoning (2026.01–2026.04)
    Teaching Assistant (Prof. Vered Shwartz). Designed, supported, and graded assignments and projects.
  • UBC, CPSC 532V – Commonsense Reasoning (2025.01–2025.04)
    Teaching Assistant (Prof. Vered Shwartz). Helped and graded student assignments and projects.
  • UBC, CPSC 532V – Commonsense Reasoning (2024.02)
    Guest lecture on multimodal commonsense, vision–language models, and future directions.
  • University of Massachusetts Amherst, CS685 Advanced Natural Language Processing (2021.02–2021.05)
    Grader (Prof. Brendan O’Connor). Graded assignments and provided feedback to students.

Talks

  • Invited to give a talk at Boson AI (Host: Alex Smola (CEO of BosonAI)), happening in summer 2026.
  • Invited talk at ResearchTrend.ai (Host: Prof. SeongJoon Oh), Nov. 26, 2025.
  • Invited talk at Seoul National University’s reading group (Host: Prof. Jay-Yoon Lee), Sep. 9, 2024, slides.
  • Career panel discussion at UMass Amherst (Host: Prof. Andrew McCallum at 696DS), Apr. 2024 and May 2025.
  • Invited talk at UT Austin (Host: Prof. Jessy Li at LIN 393), Feb. 8, 2024.

Service

Awards

  • Travel Grant — IVADO (Mar. 2025): Awarded $3000 CAD to attend the week-long seminar Safety & Guaranteed LLMs at the Simons Institute, UC Berkeley.
  • 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– )
  • Merit Scholarship — Kwangwoon University (2014.03–2015.09): Three Academic Excellence Scholarships for outstanding GPA.