Trailblazer in Human Computational Linguistics

Prof. Wong Kam-fai, Associate Dean (External Affairs) of the Faculty of Engineering and director of the Centre for Innovation and Technology, has been named a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics in the class of 2020, in recognition of his significant contributions to social media processing, particularly in Chinese information retrieval, opinion mining, microblog processing and rumour detection.

Professor Wong is among the first researchers to investigate natural language processing for microblogs, such as Twitter and Wechat. In today’s world of social media, the results of this timely research are influential to social media analysis. As a pioneer in the field, Professor Wong used different discourse integration techniques to identify contextual information in microblog repost trees, and proposed a novel summarization system by effectively differentiating leader and follower messages on repost trees based on content-level structure information.