My name is Sherry Yong Chen, and I currently work as a Knowledge Engineer at Amazon Alexa AI - Information. In 2022, I completed my PhD in Linguistics from MIT, specializing in language processing and child language acquisition. I have experience in technical product management and data analyses for language products.

As a language scientist

I am interested in exploring areas where linguistics, psychology, and computer science meet, with the goal to improve our understanding of how humans and machines acquire and comprehend language. I code in Python, R, SQL, JavaScript, and HTML/CSS. I am also experienced in statistical modeling and experimental design, and have led multiple, cross-institutional/continental collaborative projects. Beyond MIT, I have earned the Natural Language Processing Specialization Certificate offered by deeplearning.ai.

My PhD work

I work primarily on semantics and pragmatics. My doctoral dissertation, which received a grant from the National Science Foundation, investigated how adults and preschool-aged children understand presuppositional - information in complex linguistic environments. [MIT Libraries Archive]

I have also worked on several research projects in computational linguistics; see [NLP Projects] and [Research] for details.

Language technologies and products

I’m currently pursuing a career in language technologies. In my current role, I have led tPM projects coordinating with multiple teams across Amazon, anazlying large-scale data across Alexa’s 16 locales, and developing strategies for categories that make up 40% of Alexa’s Knowledge Q&A traffic. Prior to joining Amazon’s Alexa AI team, I interned as an NLP/Linguistics Engineer on the Data Science Team at Principal Financial Group.

If you are a graduate student in linguistics who is interested in exploring an industry career after completing PhD trainings, feel free to get in touch!