🌥️ I started as an Education and Linguistics student at Vietnam National University, Hanoi. Throughout my undergraduate days, I was fortunate enough to receive scholarships and grants to attend exchange programs and conferences in various topics, such as energy science and international relations, at some of the best universities, like Kyoto University, the Australian National University, and Maastricht University. After quite a few psychology, education, and linguistic mini-research projects, my biggest interest was in (critical) discourse analysis. The representations of people, thoughts, and ideologies in discourse defined my research journey at this point.
⛅ Fast forward, I was at the University of Glasgow, doing my first Master's in Applied Linguistics, with a focus on Critical Discourse Analysis and Systemic Functional Linguistics. During this time, I started to be curious about a way that could help me process more texts to get a better understanding of them. Corpus Linguistics seemed to be the answer, but it could help me to a certain extent. The better answer was Natural Language Processing, a niche first introduced to me through a conversation with a friend doing Material Sciences during my time at Kyoto University.
🌤️ Sometime later, I was lucky to be accepted into the MSc. Speech and Language Processing at the University of Edinburgh. It has been fascinating to learn how texts and audio can be processed and represented by computer systems! And it has come full circle that representations have once again become my biggest interest.
My time here was undoubtedly tough. Sometimes the math did not really make sense. In most of the cases, debugging the code took a lot of time (and tears). However, the biggest surprise was that my years of teaching the English language, especially reading skills and comprehension, helped me so much in understanding neural architectures. So far, I believe that if humans struggle with any cognitive tasks, the neural architectures also find it difficult to solve those tasks. For example, my students find it hard to give the correct verb form if the distance between the verb and the subject is great. The same applies to RNNs and GRUs! 🤖
🌠 Beyond all this academic stuff, I enjoy hiking, cooking, and reading (especially Japanese books - novels, light novels, manga, etc!)
I also like writing (I wrote short stories before - but have never shared them with anyone). I used to list being a writer as my future career ✍️
My biggest dream was to become a painter! 🖌️🎨 Now, I visit museums as much as I can 🖼️
An avid sky watcher if the weather permits 🌌
A cat appreciator in the neighborhood 🐈