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-literaturwissenschaft/forschung/fachbereich/phonetik/pundp/index.xml
[2]: https://www.heicad.hhu.de/en/aktivitaeten/translate-to-english-hhu-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

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