PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Jackie Cheung

Also known as Jackie Chi Kit Cheung, Jackie CK Cheung, 張智傑

Jackie Cheung is a computer scientist who builds and evaluates language processing systems, with work on summarization, the evaluation of NLP systems and computational pragmatics. He studied computer science at the University of British Columbia, then earned graduate degrees at the University of Toronto under Gerald Penn, and joined McGill University as an assistant professor in 2015. His 2018 paper on detecting adverbial presupposition triggers won the ACL Best Paper Award, and a 2022 paper on presuppositional inferences in NLI models won the COLING Best Short Paper Award. A Canada CIFAR AI Chair since 2018, he is an associate professor at McGill, an Associate Scientific Co-Director at Mila and co-director of the Reasoning and Learning Lab.

Timeline

  1. 2004–2008

    Computer science at UBC

    From 2004 to 2008, he studies computer science at the University of British Columbia, with minors in linguistics and German, advised by Giuseppe Carenini.

  2. 2008–2014

    Toronto degrees under Gerald Penn

    He pursues an M.Sc. from 2008 to 2010 and a PhD from 2010 to 2014 in computer science at the University of Toronto, advised by Gerald Penn. His 2014 dissertation is Distributional Semantics for Robust Automatic Summarization.

  3. 2013–2014

    A Facebook Fellowship

    He is supported by a Facebook Fellowship for 2013–2014 during his doctoral work on computational linguistics at Toronto.

  4. 2015–2021

    Assistant professor at McGill

    He starts as an assistant professor in McGill University's School of Computer Science in January 2015. In 2021, he becomes an associate professor there.

  5. 2018

    ACL best paper on presupposition

    In 2018, he coauthors with Andre Cianflone, Yulan Feng and Jad Kabbara a paper that introduces the task of predicting adverbial presupposition triggers, with two new corpora and a tailored attention mechanism. The paper wins the ACL 2018 Best Paper Award.

  6. 2018–2023

    Canada CIFAR AI Chair

    CIFAR appoints him a Canada CIFAR AI Chair in 2018 and renews the appointment in 2023.

  7. 2022

    A COLING best short paper

    In 2022, he coauthors with Jad Kabbara a short paper on the performance of Transformer-based NLI models on presuppositional inferences. It wins the Best Short Paper Award at COLING 2022.

  8. As of October 2026

    Associate professor and Mila co-director

    He is an associate professor in McGill's School of Computer Science, where he co-directs the Reasoning and Learning Lab, and a core academic member and Associate Scientific Co-Director at Mila. His research areas include the evaluation of NLP systems and computational pragmatics.

Career

  1. Since 2015McGill UniversityAssistant Professor
  2. NowMilaAssociate Scientific Co-Director and Core Academic Member

Education

  1. 2014University of TorontoPhD
  2. 2010University of TorontoM.Sc.
  3. 2008University of British Columbia

From the biography.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Jackie Cheung. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes McGill University. We estimate that 539 of the 6,766 people with a known current organization (8%) hold both a university role and a company role, including 20% of people at companies and 13% of people at universities.
  3. Universities (31%) and startups and other companies (25%) employ the largest shares of 2020–2026 entrantsIncludes Mila. Among 819 people whose first recorded role started in 2020–2026 and who have a known current organization, 60% work in commercial sectors (25% at startups and other companies, 23% at frontier labs and 13% at big tech, with 9 in two), and 31% work at universities, compared with 66% for earlier entrants.
  4. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes McGill University. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Jackie Cheung yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Jackie CK Cheung @McGill: Biographical Sketch cs.mcgill.ca. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Jackie Chi Kit Cheung @UofT cs.toronto.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Jackie Chi Kit Cheung – CIFAR cifar.ca. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Let’s do it “again”: A First Computational Approach to Detecting Adverbial Presupposition Triggers - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Jackie CK Cheung @McGill: Refereed Publications cs.mcgill.ca. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Jackie Cheung | Mila mila.quebec. Checked 21 October 2026.