34.1379, Rising Star: Anh Kim Nguyen

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-1379. Tue May 02 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.1379, Rising Star: Anh Kim Nguyen

Moderator: Malgorzata E. Cavar, Francis Tyers (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Lauren Perkins
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Steven Franks, Everett Green, Joshua Sims, Daniel Swanson, Matthew Fort, Maria Lucero Guillen Puon, Zackary Leech, Lynzie Coburn
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Lauren Perkins <lauren at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: 02-May-2023
From: Lauren Perkins [lauren at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Rising Star: Anh Kim Nguyen


During our annual Fund Drive, we like to feature undergraduate and MA
students who have gone above and beyond the classroom to participate
in the wider field of linguistics. Selected nominees exemplify a
commitment to not only academic performance, but also to the field of
linguistics and principles of scientific inquiry. Since this year’s
Fund Drive theme is Future tense, we are especially thankful to be
able to highlight undergraduate and MA students who are emerging as
the future leaders in our field.

Today’s Rising Star is Anh Kim Nguyen, an MA student at
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. Anh Kim was nominated by her
mentor, Prof. Dr. Kevin Tang.

Anh Kim is an MA student in Linguistics at HHU. Being a heritage
speaker of Vietnamese and growing up close to Düsseldorf, home to a
large Japanese community, she developed her interest in Asian
Linguistics. Despite the lack of Japanese linguistics in her BA
(Japanese Studies and Linguistics), she made a deliberate effort in
researching Japanese linguistic topics in her term papers. Now as an
MA student, she deepens her research interests by serving as a
research assistant on two projects, where she analyses the scope of
Japanese focus particles (with Dr Katalin Balogh) and writes codes to
process Japanese texts (with Prof. Kevin Tang). In only one semester,
she took courses in Python and R and read up on Japanese morphosyntax
and its computational representation in NLP parsers.

In order to learn advanced topics beyond her curriculum, she
proactively participates in a phonetics-phonology reading group, and
attends conferences and workshops (e.g., Phonetik und Phonologie im
deutschsprachigen Raum [1]). To develop her growing computational
skills, she will be partaking in a hackathon, "Human and Machine -
Artificial Intelligence in Law" [2].

Her quality extends beyond research but also in science communication
and academic service. She has recently joined my research lab [3] and
co-ordinated my lab’s presentation at the "Long Night of the
Sciences", a science communication event, where the team held
demonstrations for the general public [4]. She harnesses her talent in
graphic design for effective science communication [5]. As part of her
academic service, she serves as part of the organisation team and
designs PR illustrations for an upcoming student conference in
computational linguistics in Germany [6]. Our field could improve our
representation by having more rising stars like Anh Kim, a self-driven
young female scholar with an all-rounded set of skills from coding to
science communication.

Anh Kim writes:

During my undergraduate years, I used to be very invested in learning
about typology, historical linguistics and fieldwork research as a
means to support linguistic communities and aid the revitalisation of
moribund languages. Being a graduate student now, I know that the
process of fieldwork and language documentation has its own
problematic aspects and that there are other, more direct, and
potentially non-linguistic approaches to the problem. Still, I remain
convinced that the findings from linguistic research should benefit
people outside of academia in some way, and so, after writing a
critical discourse analysis (CDA) on language ideologies in Japan as
my BA thesis, I chose my MA classes based on how well they can prepare
me to perform empirical research on similar topics with more practical
approaches. My most recent project combined quantitative methods from
corpus linguistics with the workflow of a CDA in order to identify
biases in Japanese news articles, as an experimental attempt to see
how quantitative methods can aid qualitative research.

I see the increasing incorporation of digital tools (in the form of
e.g. online corpora, and open source software) as an important
development in non-computational fields: Not only do they speed up
research on large data sets, but they also allow re-approaches to
already known phenomena via computer simulations and modeling, and
keep research findings replicable and more accessible to other
disciplines. It feels like non-computational linguists are beginning
to normalise the use of digital tools, which makes it more likely that
they will also enter the technical areas of language technology
development:

Recent advances in AI managed to create something that can seemingly
talk like a real human being, but as these technologies become
available to the public (and their sometimes outrageous flaws becoming
more apparent), I think linguists can and should help to ensure that
these technologies are tested and developed in the interest of all
groups of people. That is, linguists should make active attempts to
stay informed about the technical workings of language technologies.
Linguists should stay able to provide relevant suggestions and
criticism in order to e.g. find ways to improve the way AIs "learn"
and use language, or - even more generally - push the development of
technologies that are primarily adjusted to English data to adapt to
other, less richly resourced languages.

In that regard, I am very lucky to be part of the Speech, Lexicon, And
Modeling lab whose research topics focus on the mental lexicon, using
computational methods among others. I have only recently begun to
learn how to work with different programs and write my own scripts,
but I can already see how much this knowledge gave me a wider range of
approaches to choose from for research, and my lab allows me to put
these skills to use. I am also glad that an enthusiastic team at my
university has allowed me to join them and organise a
computational-linguistics-themed student conference this summer. I
hope that this event can inspire the general linguists from my
department to pick up some new skills, too.

On a more curiosity-driven side, I am also rather interested in sound
symbolism research, and some of my recent projects have focused on
sound iconicity and how humans perceive it; the phenomenon alone, and
some languages' preferences to make more frequent use of mimetics than
others intrigue me a lot. I am especially interested in looking into
languages such as Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese among others, the
reason being that some languages have indisputably many speakers, but
their uses of sound symbolism haven't been considered too much in
contemporary sound symbolism research. Recent theories on the
potential role of sound iconicity in e.g. language change, aesthetic
perceptions, and its relations to human psychology make this all the
more exciting, and I think this is a great opportunity for languages
that have mostly been investigated in typological and comparative
linguistic contexts to become relevant in other fields, where findings
from Indo-European languages (and specifically, Japanese) dominate our
knowledge on the topic.

[1]: https://www.uni-bielefeld.de/fakultaeten/linguistik-literaturwiss
enschaft/forschung/fachbereich/phonetik/pundp/index.xml
[2]: https://www.heicad.hhu.de/en/aktivitaeten/translate-to-english-hh
u-legal-hackathon-2022
[3]: https://slam.phil.hhu.de/authors/anh/
[4]: https://www.heicad.hhu.de/nacht-der-wissenschaft-2022/xxx
[5]: https://slam.phil.hhu.de/ndw/
[6]: https://twitter.com/tacosconference

______________________

The LINGUIST List looks forward to continuing to serve the linguistics
community, including its up-and-coming stars, for years to come. To
that end, please consider a donation to our Fund Drive:
https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:

American Dialect Society/Duke University Press http://dukeupress.edu

Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group) http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/

Brill http://www.brill.com

Cambridge Scholars Publishing http://www.cambridgescholars.com/

Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics

Cascadilla Press http://www.cascadilla.com/

De Gruyter Mouton https://cloud.newsletter.degruyter.com/mouton

Dictionary Society of North America http://dictionarysociety.com/

Edinburgh University Press www.edinburghuniversitypress.com

Equinox Publishing Ltd http://www.equinoxpub.com/

European Language Resources Association (ELRA) http://www.elra.info

Georgetown University Press http://www.press.georgetown.edu

John Benjamins http://www.benjamins.com/

Lincom GmbH https://lincom-shop.eu/

Linguistic Association of Finland http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/sky/

MIT Press http://mitpress.mit.edu/

Multilingual Matters http://www.multilingual-matters.com/

Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG http://www.narr.de/

Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT) http://www.lotpublications.nl/

Oxford University Press http://www.oup.com/us

Wiley http://www.wiley.com


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-34-1379
----------------------------------------------------------