Young-Suk Lee

Young-Suk Lee is a Principal Research Scientist at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA. Since joining IBM Research in November, 2001, she has been involved in machine translation and natural language processing activities.

Until 2004, she focused on large scale open-domain Arabic to English translations under DARPA TIDES program, researching the impact of morphological analysis and syntax on machine translation performances. From 2004 to 2006, she was engaged in English-Spanish translations under the EU TC-Star program, researching word order/syntax, system combination, and domain adaptation. In 2007, she automated an end-to-end statistical machine translation system building process, developing state-of-the art Farsi/Urdu to English, bi-directional English and Spanish, and Chinese to English open domain translation systems. Her recent research activities include DARPA-sponsored BOLT-BC program, speech to speech translation with dialog management, for which she is responsible for dialog management and machine translation. She has developed Watson Language Translator machine translation systems for more than a dozen languages. 

Young-Suk Lee received a BA/MA in English at Seoul National University, Korea and an MSE in Computer and Information Science and PhD in Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining IBM Research, she worked as a technical staff member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and co-PI for DARPA TIDES and Communicator programs. She also taught Linguistics at Yale University.

She served on DARPA/TIDES Planning Committee for Machine Translation.  She served as area chair of machine translation for IJCNLP (International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing) 2013 and NLP PIC (Natural Language Processing Professional Interest Community) co-chair at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center from 2014 to 2016.

She has been serving on various professional committees including AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence), ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics), EACL (European Chapter of the ACL), EMNLP (Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing), COLING (International Conference on Computational Linguistics), HLT/NAACL (Human Language Technology/North American Chapter of the ACL) conferences, among many others.