一个系推举一个建校50年以来最激励人的校友，我们语言学系比较弱，矮子里拔将军被选上了。

I will attend SFU 50th anniversary celebration activities the last week of this month as inspiring alumni. Will give an academic talk on big data mining based on linguistic parsing at SFU computing department and another talk on how to prepare linguists for IT industry job market at SFU linguistics department.

Dr. Wei Li is teaching bots and crawlers to not just read language, but to understand it.

Li is the Chief Scientist at Netbase Solutions, a Silicon Valley company that mines social media data in order to assess public opinions through a cutting-edge technology that Li designed. Li completed a PhD in Computational Linguistics at SFU in 2001.

Unlike most other data mining companies, Netbase's parsing technology is one of the first in the field to apply an approach to interpreting text data--everything from tweets to Facebook updates--based on how people actually understand and use language.

“The mainstream approach used in this field is machine learning based on a bag of words, where keywords are counted and categorized as good, bad or neutral. But that doesn’t take into account the complexities of linguistic context and structures,” he says.

Li explains that his approach to data mining leads to more detailed and practical understanding of public sentiments--for example, going beyond identifying whether popular opinion on a product is positive or negative to explain the cause of those trends. These richer and more insightful results can then actually be applied to remedy weaknesses or misconceptions.

Li's technology has been hugely successful, winning his company Fortune 500 clients ranging from music industry professionals to soft drink giants. As a result, he explains, the field as whole has begun shifting.

“My field has been dominated by statistical models based on keywords rather than linguistic structures. Linguistics is often critiqued as not a science. This is unhealthy as both approaches have their respective pros and cons.” says Li.

Li is continuing to push the field of computational linguistics forward by leading a team of linguists to apply his parsing technology beyond its base in English and Chinese.  His team has developed deep parsers for eight languages and is now expanding to 12 more new languages, including almost all major European and Asian languages.  

“As a linguist I’m very excited to see if I can come up with a recipe that is general enough to adapt to all languages with very limited adjustment,” he says.

Li credits his graduate training for helping him gain the skills and insight that has led him to where he is now.

“I had the industry experience when I came to SFU but my thinking was too narrow. SFU helped broaden my academic horizons. Thanks to my Ph.D. advisors, Dr. Paul McFetridge and Dr. Fred Popowich, I learned how to communicate with both linguists and engineers and learn from both sides,” he says.

Author: Jackie Amsden

from inspring alumni profiles on SFU 50th Anniversary:  

https://www.sfu.ca/dean-gradstudies/blog/year/2015/09/WeiLi-Linguistics.html

About 50 most inspiring alumni at SFU

http://www.sfu.ca/dean-gradstudies/blog/year/2015/09/50InspiringAlumni.html

Home / Blog / Year / 2015 / 09 / 50 Inspiring Alumni

PEOPLE PROFILES50 InspiringAlumni

September01, 2015

A researcher voted one of the World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds of 2014,a globe trotting under-water filmmaker, and a medical doctor who founded one of North America's largest road races in his spare time.

What have graduate students been up to in the last 50 years?

As part of our celebrations to make the university's 50thAnniversary, we decided to find out.

We asked graduate program staff, faculty and retirees to choosethe top fifty most inspiring graduate students from the over 22,000 graduatedegress that have been conferred by SFU in the last five decades (seemore of the history of Graduate Studies at SFU.)

What did we find?

These alumni stories demonstrate how SFU's graduate students havealways found ways to engage the world in order to build a better society, tosolve human problems, and to bring delight and warmth to others--with of coursea little help from their graduate programs.

Over and over, the alumni interviewed for this series described theirgraduate experiences as a unique opportunities where they were challenged intoseeing things in new ways and were supported to take their lives in new andexciting directions.

But don't trust us, check out the stories yourself.

We'll be publishing three profiles a week over the fall 2015 term.We hope you'll enjoy learning about SFU's amazing past as much as we did!

·        Amy Mundorff,PhD, Archaeology

·        Anicka Quin,MPUB, Publishing

·        AnthonyKupferschmidt, MA, Gerontology

·        BarbaraRae, MBA, Beedie School of Business

·        Derek Bingham, PhD, Statistics and Actuarial Science

·        Ethel GardnerPhD, Education

·        Jack Taunton, MSc, Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology

·        KenSpencer, MBA, Beedie School of Business

·        KennedyStewart, MA, Political Science

·        Liz Elliott,PhD, Criminology

·        NielsVeldhuis, MA, Economics

·        Parvind Grewal, PhD, Mechatronic Systems Engineering

·        RaghavachariAmritavalli, PhD, Linguistics

·        Rudy Reimer,MA, Archaeology

·        SheelaghCarpendale, PhD, Computer Science

·        Wayde Compton,MA, English

·        Wei Li, PhD,Linguistics

Tags: People Profiles; 50 Inspiring Alumni