Jackie Chit Kit Cheung

Jackie Chit Kit Cheung is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University, where he co-directs the Reasoning and Learning Lab. He holds the Canada CIFAR AI Chair and serves as an Associate Scientific Co-Director at the Mila Quebec AI Institute. He is also a consulting researcher at Microsoft Research Montreal.

Academic Background:

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Toronto (2010–2014)
• M.Sc. in Computer Science, University of Toronto (2008–2010)
• B.Sc. (Honours) in Computer Science, minors in Linguistics and German, University of British Columbia (2004–2008)

Research Interests:
Jackie Cheung's research lies at the intersection of natural language processing, machine learning, and cognitive science. He focuses on natural language generation, automatic summarization, commonsense and pragmatic reasoning, and the evaluation of NLP systems. His work aims to build language models that reflect real-world structure and reasoning, with applications in health, education, and language revitalization. He is particularly interested in how implicit meaning is processed in context, a core concern in linguistic pragmatics.

Publication Trends:
His recent publications (2024–2025) show a strong emphasis on evaluation methodologies (e.g., COSMIC, ECBD), hallucination and factuality in language models, coreference and reasoning, and long-context modeling. He frequently collaborates across institutions and integrates insights from linguistics and psychology into NLP system design and analysis.

Scientific Awards:

• Best Paper Award, ACL 2018
• Outstanding Paper Award, NAACL 2018 Student Research Workshop
• SAC Award, ACL 2024 (for COSMIC)
• Best Poster Award, CMDO AI-Health Symposium 2024

Advising and Grants:
He advises a large and diverse group of graduate students, including PhD and Master’s candidates, often in co-supervision with other faculty. His group has received support from major AI and health research initiatives, including CIFAR and Mila. He has trained alumni who have gone on to faculty and industry research positions. He has served in leadership roles in top NLP conferences, including as Senior Area Chair, Workshop Chair, and Program Chair of Canadian AI 2018.

Labs and Teams:
He co-directs the Reasoning and Learning Lab at McGill and is deeply involved with Mila – Quebec AI Institute. He founded the NLP Reading Group at McGill, which brings together researchers from computer science, linguistics, and information studies to discuss theoretical and applied NLP topics.