Hadas Kotek

office location: Cambridge, MA
email: hkotek at alum.mit.edu

I am a machine learning researcher and linguist working at Apple. I am a member of Responsible AI team, currently leading the data and evaluation efforts for the Apple Intelligence. In this role, I focus on identifying, evaluating, and developing mitigation strategies for harms and biases in customer-facing products that use Apple’s Large Language Models. I have expertise in managing all aspects of data generation, annotation, red-teaming, model evaluation, and data analysis for ML models at scale— including onboarding and training annotators; designing annotation tasks and tooling; data sampling; data analysis for annotation accuracy, consistency, and efficiency; error analysis; model evaluation; insight distillation; and reporting to stakeholders.

I additionally maintain an affiliation with the MIT Department of Linguistics, and continue to engage in research and publication as part of my role at Apple and as my role at MIT. My publications have focused on NLP, human-in-the-loop annotation, efficient data collection, question answering, visual understanding, and Responsible AI. In Fall 2024, I am teaching a seminar on LLMs at MIT, open to undergraduate and graduate students in the Boston area. Check out the syllabus and blurb on my teaching page.

I am currently a member of the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), Chair of the LSA Committee on Gender Equity in Linguistics, and a member of the LSA Committee on Linguistic Institutes and Fellowships. Most recently, I am a co-organizer of LEXING: Linguists in Industry, Non-profits, and Government, a symposium co-located with the LSA Annual Meeting in January 2025, bringing together linguists working outside academia in all sectors and careers.

I received my PhD in Linguistics from MIT in 2014, with a dissertation on the syntax, semantics, and processing of questions. Prior to joining Apple, I was a Lecturer in Semantics at Yale and a Visiting Assistant Professor in Syntax at NYU, and I have held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at McGill University. My academic research focused on different aspects of the syntax-semantics interface, using both traditional and experimental methods. I mainly worked on A-bar phenomena, including wh-questions, focus constructions, relative clauses and free relatives, ellipsis, wh-indefinites, (focus) intervention effects, and comparatives and superlatives.

Please visit my About page for more details concerning my research interests and my academic history. See my resume, my academic CV, my MIT linguistics user page, or my LinkedIn page for additional details.

✨ ️NEW✨ Blog

Responsible AI

Informational posts about non-academic jobs

Posts about academia

Science and other outreach

Newest work

Technical Report

Peer reviewed conference papers:

Journal papers:

Books:

Recorded talks

Additional details about these and other papers and presentations can be found on my publications page. To read more about my various projects, visit the research page.

For the most up to date list of my presentations and publications, please consult my CV.