34.1460, Rising Star: Rayyan Merchant

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-1460. Wed May 10 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.1460, Rising Star: Rayyan Merchant

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Date: 08-May-2023
From: Lauren Perkins [lauren at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Rising Star: Rayyan Merchant


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 Rayyan Merchant, an undergraduate student at
the University of Florida. Rayyan was nominated by his mentor, Prof.
Dr. Kevin Tang.

Rayyan is a senior double majoring in Linguistics and Computer Science
at the University of Florida. Before entering UF, he was invited to
the University Research Scholars Program [1] which introduced him to
undergraduate research. When he approached Dr. Tang in his first
semester to ask to join his research group, he already had clear
intent in terms of the path he would like to take, which is to harness
computational linguistics for social good. Since then, he has been
engaging in research and is proving to be a budding scholar with
plenty of gumption. During his language training in Tajikistan (funded
by both the NSLI-Y [2] and Boren scholarships [3]), he interacted with
local communities and identified that there is a low level of
technological literacy partly due to the poor web presence of Tajiki,
a minority language, written in Tajik Cyrillic. To tackle this social
need, he proposed to devise a deep learning model to enable Tajiki
speakers to access web content in Farsi written in Perso-Arabic. To
realise his proposal, he proactively applied to the competitive
University Scholars Program [4] (selected 200 students from all
disciplines) which financially enabled him to work with Dr. Tang. His
work has been accepted to the upcoming LSA 98th Annual Meeting. He
intends to further develop this work in his honors thesis and is in
the process of writing it up as an ACL paper. To further improve
linguistic resource diversity, he has been web-mining a corpus of
three regional Spanishes in a group project. Rayyan successfully
harnesses his growing computational linguistics to support his
humanitarian interests. Not only does he have the insight to identify
social needs but also the initiative to realise his plans by
proactively seeking out research opportunities and funding, all the
while staying on top of his education.

Rayyan writes:

As someone studying both computer science and linguistics,
computational linguistics has always been of great interest to me. Due
to its heritage from two very broad fields, I believe that we are only
just beginning to tap into its full potential despite its already
numerous current uses.

Of these many applications, one in particular has firmly held my
attention: the application of computational linguistics (and NLP) to
societal problems. Researchers exploring this topic have created tools
that can detect different types of bias and propaganda, assist medical
professionals in diagnosis, and aid students with different learning
disabilities. In truth, despite the huge progress made, we are
watching this burgeoning field advance in leaps and bounds every day.
Due to my interest in this area, I am incredibly thankful to conduct
research in the Speech, Lexicon, and Modeling Laboratory, an
environment where this concept takes center stage.

Accordingly, my own Bachelor’s thesis project focuses on using
linguistics to increase access to the Internet for a linguistic
minority. Despite speaking a variety of Persian, Tajikistanis are
unable to read anything on the Internet written by Persian-speakers
from Iran and Afghanistan, as they write in the Cyrillic script rather
than the much more prevalent Arabic script. My work investigates
whether a tool can be created to transliterate between the two
incongruous scripts. Once our efforts have reached an acceptable
threshold, we aim to make our tool accessible via a web browser
extension, thereby making the Internet more accessible to speakers of
Tajik Persian.

In a country where most interact with the Internet in Russian and/or
English, being able to access the Internet in one’s native language
(and script) is a remarkable boon, especially for monolingual speakers
of Tajik Persian. As someone whose own mother tongue (Konkani) is
split between several scripts, I understand how frustrating it can be
to know that the language on the screen is your own, yet nonetheless
out of reach. It is my belief that the future of computational
linguistics is one that occupies itself with easing such frustrations.

Following graduation, I hope to further explore how I may contribute
to this through the pursuit of a PhD in computational linguistics or
language technology. My eventual goal is to conduct research in the
technology industry, working to create tools that can be of particular
use to linguistic minorities and marginalized communities.

References:
[1]: University Research Scholars Program
https://cur.aa.ufl.edu/about-ursp/;
[2]: National Security Language Initiative for Youth
https://www.nsliforyouth.org
[3]: Boren scholarship: https://news.ufl.edu/2020/06/boren/
[4]: University Scholars Program
https://cur.aa.ufl.edu/portfolio/rayyan-merchant/

_______________________

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