Tanya Goyal is an assistant professor of computer science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. Previously, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the Princeton Language and Intelligence Center. Goyal received her Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Texas, Austin.
What is your academic focus?
My focus is on natural language processing (NLP).
Could you briefly summarize your research?
My research interests are primarily in the field of NLP. Problems that I am currently excited about include reliable and sustainable evaluation frameworks for large language models (LLMs), as well as factuality assessment and improvement of LLMs. I am also interested in understanding LLM behaviors as a function of training data and/or alignment strategies.
What inspired you to pursue a career in this field?
I actually went to UT Austin with the intention of doing a masters in computer science, [then] graduating, and working in Big Tech. In my first semester, I took my (future) advisor’s NLP course. I really enjoyed the class and my research collaborations with him, and decided to stay longer for a Ph.D.
What are you most looking forward to as a Cornell faculty member?
I am most looking forward to collaborating with students and other researchers at Cornell. Back when I visited, I had tons of exciting research discussions with the community here, which was the major factor behind my decision to join Cornell.
Which courses are you most looking forward to teaching?
I’m excited to teach Advanced Language Technologies this fall which is a graduate course in NLP. This course covers recent developments in large language models, including architectures, training strategies, and evaluation methods.