I'm currently an Assistant Professor in Computational Linguistics at Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam, working with the Computational Linguistics & Text Mining Lab. I have an interdisciplinary background, a strong foundation in multilingual Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, and a wide range of research interests.

Before joining VU Amsterdam, I held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship, funded by the European Commission (Horizon 2020). I was hosted at the Asian Studies Department from Palacký University Olomouc, in the Czech Republic. This fellowship focused on improving the tasks of Parsing and Grammatical Error Detection (GED) for Mandarin Chinese using computational grammars (see more).

I've completed my PhD from the Interdisciplinary Graduate Programme, at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), in Singapore. My thesis was titled Using Rich Models of Language in Grammatical Error Detection, and looked at exploiting computational grammars to improve the task of GED for English and Mandarin Chinese. Towards this end, I've created a new kind of learner corpus (i.e. Learner Treebanks) where error labels are placed deep within the syntactic structure instead of on the sentence surface level.

Before starting my PhD, I was a Research Associate at the Computational Linguistics Lab under the supervision of Francis Bond, also at NTU, Singapore. During this time worked on tasks such as Parsing, Word Sense Disambiguation and Sentiment Analysis. I've also acquired a lot of experience in building language resources (corpora, wordnets, treebanks, etc.). In particular, I become a main contributor of the Open Multilingual Wordnet, a project pushing an open data agenda for language resources, in particular of wordnets.

I'm a member of DELPH-IN, sharing the communal commitment of open-source development of NLP tools for high quality (linguistically motivated) syntactic and semantic parsing. And I'm also a member of the Global Wordnet Association, contributing to open-source research on computational lexical semantics.

My research interests include Educational Technology, Grammatical Error Detection, Computational Lexical Semantics, Syntactic and Semantic Parsing, Digital Humanities, Chinese NLP as well as general Mandarin Chinese and Japanese Linguistics. In my research, I like to work towards modeling and intersecting diverse aspects of linguistic knowledge with different AI tasks. I work mainly with English and Mandarin Chinese, but I've also worked with other languages such as Japanese, Portuguese, Kristang, Cantonese, Coptic, Indonesian and Abui.

For more detail about my work, you can click here to see a list of some of my current and previous projects.