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My name is Sherry Yong Chen, and I currently work as a Technical Program Manager at Amazon Artificial General Intelligence. 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 as a TPM, I manage technical programs that improve Alexa’s LLM-empowered answering abilities, diversify the modes of customer experiences on multi-modal devices, and consolidate tech stacks to drive operational efficiency. I love being the “dot connector”, and I work closely with engineers, scientists, and product managers, to drive initiatives across AGI teams and deliver features that our customers love. 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!