I’m an Applied Scientist at the Generative AI Innovation Center at Amazon Web Services, where I help companies tackle real business problems by building GenAI applications. I’ve been at Amazon since September 2022 — before moving to AWS, I worked on making Alexa smarter for kids on the Alexa Kids team, and on voice experiences for Fire TV on the Fire TV SLU team.

My academic background is in Computational Linguistics — I completed my PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I worked with Prof. Lane Schwartz on computational methods for low-resource languages. My research spanned multilingual language modeling (TACL 2021), dependency parsing for low-resource languages., and neural approaches to polysynthetic language modeling as part of the JSALT 2019 workshop (Neural Polysynthetic Language Modeling). My dissertation brought much of this work together. Alongside my PhD, I also completed an MS in Statistics in August 2021.

Before focusing on NLP research, I earned a master’s degree in Teaching English as a Second Language and published work in language assessment with Prof. Xun Yan. During my PhD, I also interned at AWS in Summer 2021, where I worked on long document classification using Transformers.

Feel free to reach out at hayley.uiuc@gmail.com

Publications

• Efficient Classification of Long Documents Using Transformers
  Hyunji Hayley Park, Yogarshi Vyas, Kashif Shah
  Association for Computational Linguistics, 2022

• Expanding Universal Dependencies for Polysynthetic Languages: A Case of St. Lawrence Island Yupik
  Hyunji Hayley Park, Lane Schwartz, Francis M. Tyers
  Workshop on NLP for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP), North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2021

• Morphology Matters: A Multilingual Language Modeling Analysis
  Hyunji Hayley Park, Katherine J. Zhang, Coleman Haley, Kenneth Steimel, Han Liu, Lane Schwartz
  Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL), 2021

• A Digital Corpus of St. Lawrence Island Yupik
  Lane Schwartz, Emily Chen, Hyunji Hayley Park, Edward Jahn, Sylvia L.R. Schreiner
  Workshop on Computational Methods for Endangered Languages (ComputEL-4), 2021

• Speech Fluency, Research Questions in Language Education and Applied Linguistics: A Reference Guide (Editors: Hassan Mohebbi, Christine Coombe)
  Xun Yan, Yuyun Lei, Hyunji (Hayley) Park
  Springer, 2021

• Neural Polysynthetic Language Modelling
  Lane Schwartz, Francis Tyers, Lori Levin, Christo Kirov, Patrick Littell, Chi-kiu Lo, Emily Prud’hommeaux, Hyunji Hayley Park, Kenneth Steimel, Rebecca Knowles, Jeffrey Micher, Lonny Strunk, Han Liu, Coleman Haley, Katherine J. Zhang, Robbie Jimmerson, Vasilisa Andriyanets, Aldrian Obaja Muis, Naoki Otani, Jong Hyuk Park, Zhisong Zhang
  Final Report of the Neural Polysynthetic Language Modelling Team at the 2019 Frederick Jelinek Memorial Summer Workshop, 2020

• Improved Finite-State Morphological Analysis for St. Lawrence Island Yupik Using Paradigm Function Morphology
  Emily Chen, Hyunji Hayley Park, Lane Schwartz
  Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), 2020

• An investigation into rater performance with a holistic scale and a binary, analytic scale on an ESL writing placement test
  Hyunji Park, Xun Yan
  Papers in Language Testing and Assessment, 2019

• Book Review: Second Language Pronunciation Assessment: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
  Xun Yan, Hyunji (Hayley) Park
  Language Testing, 2019