PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Kenton Lee

Kenton Lee co-wrote BERT, a language representation model whose preprint appeared in October 2018. While a CSE Ph.D. student, he shared the EMNLP 2016 best paper award with Mike Lewis and Luke Zettlemoyer for Global Neural CCG Parsing with Optimality Guarantees. BERT won the Best Long Paper award at NAACL 2019. In 2020 he co-developed REALM, a model that adds document retrieval to language model pretraining, and in 2023 he co-authored Pix2Struct, a model pretrained by parsing masked web screenshots into simplified HTML. As of October 2026, he is a research scientist at Google DeepMind.

Timeline

  1. 2016

    A best paper at EMNLP

    As a CSE Ph.D. student, he shares the EMNLP 2016 best paper award with Mike Lewis and Luke Zettlemoyer for Global Neural CCG Parsing with Optimality Guarantees.

  2. 2018

    Co-writing BERT

    He co-writes BERT, a language representation model, with Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang and Kristina Toutanova; the preprint appears in October 2018.

  3. 2019

    A best long paper at NAACL

    BERT, written by Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee and Kristina Toutanova, wins the Best Long Paper award at NAACL 2019.

  4. 2020

    The REALM retrieval model

    He co-develops REALM with Kelvin Guu, Zora Tung, Panupong Pasupat and Mingwei Chang, a model that adds document retrieval to language model pretraining, and the paper appears at ICML in 2020.

  5. 2023

    Pix2Struct screenshot pretraining

    He co-authors Pix2Struct, a model pretrained by parsing masked web screenshots into simplified HTML, and the paper appears at ICML in 2023.

  6. As of October 2026

    A research scientist at Google DeepMind

    He is a research scientist at Google DeepMind, after serving as a CS PhD student at the University of Washington.

Sources and credits

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  1. Allen School News Archive » UW CSE researchers win Best Paper Award at EMNLP 2016 news.cs.washington.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  2. BERT (language model) - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  3. [1810.04805] BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  4. Best Paper Awards - NAACL-HLT 2019 naacl.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  5. Retrieval Augmented Language Model Pre-Training proceedings.mlr.press. Checked 14 October 2026.
  6. [2002.08909] REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  7. Pix2Struct: Screenshot Parsing as Pretraining for Visual Language Understanding proceedings.mlr.press. Checked 14 October 2026.
  8. [2210.03347] Pix2Struct: Screenshot Parsing as Pretraining for Visual Language Understanding arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  9. Kenton Lee | alphaXiv alphaxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  10. Kenton Lee kentonl.com. Checked 14 October 2026.