Woman Computer Scientist: Danqi Chen

Born in Hunan, China, Danqi Chen exhibited high talent in Computer Science from a young age. She won the gold medal in the 20th International Olympiad Informatics(IOI), which made her directly admitted to Tsinghua University where she received her bachelor’s degree. After that, she entered Stanford University to pursue advanced studies. Now, she has become an assistant professor at Princeton University.

Her main research focus is on the natural language process(NLP), which is a hot topic these years. According to Chen, she is most interested in the intersection of human languages and computers, developing algorithms to help computers understand human expressions.

In 2022, Chen’s research group published a research paper—MABEL: Attenuating Gender Bias using Textual Entailment Data. In this paper, they proposed MABEL, an intermediate pre-training approach for mitigating gender bias in contextualized representations. What is also worth mentioning is that all authors of this paper are women, including Jaqueline He, Mengzhou Xia, Christian Fellhaum, and Danqi Chen.

In an interview about women’s power, Chen mentioned her experience when participating in computing competitions in high school. She received much more attention than other participants for her achievements because she is a girl, which was not what she wanted—this actually suggested a potential gender stereotype.

Chen hoped that girls who want to learn STEM should gain more access to diverse opportunities or more resources (while she did not mean that standards need to be lowered). She firmly believes that the gap between males and females in STEM will finally be eliminated.

References:

1. https://paw.princeton.edu/article/behind-research-danqi-chen-decodes-language-

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2. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~danqic/

3. https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.14975

4. https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/475887875