Dr. Chen Shani

I study concepts as the building blocks of intelligence. My goal is to develop AI systems that learn and reason over concepts rather than sequences of tokens. 

I am an Assistant Professor at Tel-Aviv University.  

Before that, I was aa Post-Doctoral Researcher at Stanford University, working with Professor Dan Jurafsky and Professor Jennifer Eberhardt.  

I completed my Ph.D. under the supervision of Professor Dafna Shahaf at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  My Ph.D. focused on designing NLP architectures that incorporate principles from human cognition, with a specific interest in NLP tasks related to subjective human qualities: humor, playfulness, personification, and creativity. My findings demonstrate the potential of integrating human-inspired perspectives to advance NLP and create more human-like models.

I am also an ex-Amazonian, where I co-founded a team aimed to automatically enhance Alexa's sense of humor. In addition, I occasionally consult start-up companies.

Collaborations, thoughts, and brainstorming are my treat, so feel free to reach out!