Fengwei (Isaac) LIU

Hi, good to see you here! I’m Isaac, a linguistics researcher, a Cog. Sc. student, and an NLP novice. I’ve recently graduated with a BA in Russian from Shanghai International Studies University and will move to Ottawa in 2025 Fall to join the L-Neuro Lab and the ANIMUS Lab, with Dr. Jouravlev and Dr. Kelly as my supervisors. I’m currently seeking professional development in this bridging year.

I’m generally interested in empirical and computational studies of diversity in languages. In particular:

• Language and social diversity: the discursive construction of identities, ideologies, and biases.
• Diversity across language structures: how the universalities and language contingencies interact in multilingual minds. My undergrad thesis investigated this effect on Dependency Distance Minimization.

Meanwhile, I am curious about how my research may be put into practice to tackle real-life technical issues. This is why I’ve been actively learning Data Science and NLP.

I am currently working on a new project that adopts ML methods to untangle the biases embedded in Shanghai new media targeted at local transnational workers. Building on this project, I wish to examine how the dynamic nature of discursive practice and commonsense reasoning may be modeled or processed by NLP systems, and how this process forms a better understanding of the human mind.

I seek topics that couple the acuteness of humanities and the pragmatism of engineering. I’ll dedicate my master’s degree to explore what linguistic diversity entails about the human cognition and how this can inspire well-rounded, ethical machine intelligence.