I am a linguist working at the intersection of formal syntax and semantics, experimental linguistics, computational grammar engineering, and linguistically informed LLM approaches. 

I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics at the University of Oxford and an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Manchester.

I received my PhD in Linguistics from the University of Manchester, where my doctoral research was supervised by Prof. Kersti Börjars and Prof. Eva Schultze-Berndt. Prior to this, I completed both my Master's and Bachelor's degrees at the University of Hong Kong. Alongside my research activities, I am a Fellow of Advance HE (UK) and a qualified English language teaching professional in Hong Kong.

My research investigates how grammatical knowledge is represented and interpreted across syntax, semantics, and discourse. I am particularly interested in reference, predication, control, coreference, and information-structural phenomena, as well as the ways in which these interact across different levels of grammatical representation. Much of my work focuses on understanding how linguistic constraints can be formulated precisely, tested empirically, and implemented computationally.

A defining feature of my research is the integration of theoretical, experimental, and computational approaches. I develop formally explicit grammatical analyses, evaluate them using corpus data and controlled experiments, and implement them in large-scale computational grammars. This combination allows me to investigate both the empirical adequacy and computational robustness of grammatical theories while contributing reusable linguistic resources for the wider research community.

The theoretical foundation of my work is Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), a constraint-based and non-derivational framework that supports explicit modelling across multiple grammatical representations. Within this framework, I study dependency relations such as control, coreference, and anaphora, while also engaging in systematic comparison with alternative approaches, including Minimalism, to better understand the explanatory foundations of grammatical theory.

Empirically, my research draws on data from Sinitic languages—especially Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese—as well as English and other languages, including, most recently, Irish (collaborator: Prof. Elaine Ui Dhonnchadha), through cross-linguistic comparison. My earlier work also examined Cantonese–English code-switching and bilingual language acquisition.

In recent years, I have become increasingly involved in computational grammar engineering and multilingual resource development. As a member of the international Parallel Grammar (ParGram) Consortium, I contribute to the development of broad-coverage computational grammars and treebanks implemented in the Xerox Linguistic Environment (XLE). My recent research explores the interface between symbolic grammatical representations and large language models (LLMs), with particular attention to grammar engineering, multilingual resource creation, and the evaluation of computational models using linguistically informed criteria. Since 2023, I have co-organised monthly international ParGram research meetings with Prof. Mary Dalrymple (University of Oxford) and Prof. Elaine Ui Dhonnchadha (Trinity College Dublin), bringing together researchers from around the world to compare and refine computational grammatical analyses.

More broadly, my research aims to show how formally explicit linguistic theory, empirical evidence, and computational methods can be combined to advance our understanding of human language while producing practical resources for future linguistic and computational research.