Bio

Scott Wen-tau Yih is a Research Scientist at Meta Fundamental AI Research (FAIR). Prior to this, he held notable positions as Principal Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) (2017-2019) and Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research (MSR) (2005-2017), after receiving his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2005. Dr. Yih’s research interests span natural language processing, machine learning, and information retrieval, with recent focus on neural retrieval models and retrieval-augmented generation to enhance factuality in text and multimodal language models. Dr. Yih has published numerous influential papers, including WikiQA, DPR, and RAG, which have garnered significant recognition. He received the best paper award from CoNLL’11 and an outstanding paper award from ACL’15. Additionally, he has served in various leadership roles within the NLP and ML communities, including program co-chairs (CEAS’09, CoNLL’14, EMNLP’21) and senior area chairs for NLP (ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, EACL) and ML (ICLR, NeurIPS) conferences. Dr. Yih has an h-index of 81 and more than 45,000 citations, and was selected as an ACL Fellow in 2024.