Min-Yen Kan
Min's picture
 School of Computing

Min-Yen Kan (靳民彦)

Associate Professor

Vice Dean, Undergraduate Office
COM3 02-30
11 Research Link
National University of Singapore
Singapore 119391
kanmy@comp.nus.edu.sg (GPG Key | ORCID)
knmnyn@nus.edu.sg knmnyn@skype
P: ++ (65) 6516-1885 | F: ++ (65) 6779-4580

My research interests fall under the areas of digital libraries, natural language processing, information retrieval, human-computer interaction. Specifically, they include document structure acquisition, verb analysis, digital library resource annotation and and applied text summarization. My research goal aims to investigate how natural language processing and information retrieval can be applied to improve scholarly publication and knowledge discovery.

WING logo

I run the Web, Information Retrieval / Natural Language Processing Group (WING) at SoC. We are not the only group dealing with these topics — Web, DL, IR and NLP — and our research isn't limited just to these topics, but it is a good description of the research we do. We have lots of demos, projects and corpora there, including ones that I have had a direct hand in coding such as those on webpage classification, document structure and reference string parsing. There's also plenty of newer work done by the students in WING: including Twitter retweet predictor and classifier, and the Chaptrs photograph organizing and sharing app (for Macs), the world's largest SMS corpus (please contribute!). and the world's best summarization system.

WING is currently affiliated with the China Singapore Institute of Digital Media (CSIDM) and the NUS-Tsinghua Extreme Search Centre (NExT).

I'm also a member and potential supervisor for students in the NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering (NGS).

I also lead our group in collecting resources used to do such research. Visit the Natural Language Processing / Information Retrieval research framework webpage (cte/sunfire) to see what tools we have available and installed for related research directions and projects.

Conversely, if you're currently doing an FYP or UROP, I've written some notes on what it's like to grade them and what you should be doing as students to try to optimize your grade. When you're ready to present your work in a defense, check out the notes that I wrote on the defense process.

Current Graduate Student Cohort

  1. Liangming Pan, Topics in Neural Question Generation. NGS Scholar.
  2. Abhinav Ramesh Kashyap, Topics in Domain Adaptation
  3. Hengchang Hu, Topics in Job and Course Recommendation Systems.
  4. Taha Aksu, Topics in Dialogue Systems, SINGA Scholar, co-supervised with Dr Nancy Chen (I2R).
  5. Samson Tan, Topics in Adversarial NLP and NLP Ethics, Salesforce IPP, co-supervised with Shafiq Joty (Salesforce Research).
  6. Xinyuan Lu, Topics in Psychological Aspects of Recommendation Systems. NGS Scholar.
  7. Yajing Yang, Topics in Document Understanding, Rio Tinto IPP.
  8. Yuxi Xie, Topics in Natural Language Processing.
  9. Victor Li Chuang, Topics in Recommendation Systems. NGS Scholar, co supervised by Prof. Haizhou Li
  10. Yisong Miao, Topics in Dialogue Systems.
  11. Saurabh Jain, Topics in Dialogue Systems. Masters Dissertation student.

My group also hosts the occasional postgraduate intern from collaborative projects or one-off internships, which are not listed here.

Past Alumni

I list WING's graduated graduate students (MS, Ph.D.) here. I have also directly supervised over 100 undergraduate projects and theses. More accurate about the current affiliations of our alumni be found in our LinkedIn group (viewable only by members). A more complete list of past alumni (including undergraduates and system staff), see WING.

  1. Dr Samson Tan Min Rong, Linguistically-Inclusive Natural Language Processing, graduated 2022, now an an Applied Scientist at AWS AI Research and Education
  2. Dr Liangming Pan, Towards generating deep questions from text, graduated 2022, upcoming postdoctoral scholar with UC Santa Barbara
  3. Saurabh Jain, Comparative Response Generation, graduated M.Comp 2022, now a Natural Language Processing Researcher with Active.Ai
  4. Yuan Chuan Kee: Neural Scientific Document Parser and Neural ParsCit, graduated M.Comp 2021, now Lead Data EngineerLead Data Engineer at Xfers, Singapore.
  5. Ding Xu, SEC-LS: Section-Based Long Summaries for Scientific Documents, graduated M.Comp 2020.
  6. Saumya Ahuja, Concept Evolution in Scientific Literature, graduated M.Comp 2020, now a Technical Product Manager with C-Suite Circle
  7. Weixin Wang, Towards Complex and Cross-Domain Text-to-SQL Parsing Through Schema Reference Resolution, graduated M.Comp 2020, now with Institute of Infocomm Research (I2R).
  8. Dr Animesh Prasad, Structured Information Extraction for Scientific Documents, graduated 2020, now an Applied Scientist II at Amazon (Alexa).
  9. Yisong Miao, Advanced Method Towards Conversational Recommendation, graduated M.Comp 2020, now a doctoral student in WING.
  10. Dr Kishaloy Halder, Information Retrieval Techniques to Facilitate Discussion in Online Forums, graduated 2020, now an Applied Scientist at Zalando (UK).
  11. Dr Wenqiang Lei, Topic Continuity for Discourse and Dialogues, graduated 2019, now a postdoc in NExT++.
  12. Dr Muthu Kumar Chandrasekaran, A Discourse Centric Framework for Facilitating Instructor Intervention in MOOC Discussion Forums, graduated 2019, now an Research Scientist II with Amazon US.
  13. Yuanxin Xiang, Verb Duration Determination, graduated 2017, now at Institute of Infocomm Research (I2R), Singapore.
  14. Chencan Xu, CrowdMOD: Crowdsourced Moderation for Structured Online Deliberation, graduated 2017.
  15. Dr Tao Chen, Analyzing Image Tweets in Microblogs, graduated 2016, now a Research Engineer with Google USA (California).
  16. Dr Xiangnan He, Exploiting User Comments for Web Applications, graduated 2016, now a professor at the University of Science and Technology of China
  17. Dr Aobo Wang, Addressing Informality in Processing Chinese Microtext, graduated 2015, now a Lecturer and Consultant with the Institute of System Science, Singapore.
  18. Dr Jovian Lin, Recommender Algorithms for Mobile Applications, graduated 2014, now with Facebook.
  19. Dr Jun Ping Ng, Interpreting Time In Text, Summarizing Text With Time, graduated 2014, now Software Engineer with Demand Forecasting, Amazon, New York, USA.
  20. Dr Jesse Prabawa Gozali, Intra-event Photo Organization, graduated 2013, now a Researcher with Mobilewalla, Singapore
  21. Dr Jin Zhao, Domain Specific Information Retrieval, graduated 2013, now a Lecturer with the School of Computing, NUS, Singapore
  22. Bamdad Bahrani, Reëxamining Slide Alignment, graduated 2012, now a Data Analytics Specialist at Nurse Next Door
  23. Dr Ziheng Lin, Discourse Parsing, graduated 2012, now a Senior Director with Dentsu Aegis, Singapore, previously with SAP Singapore.
  24. Dr Yee Fan Tan, Cost-Sensitive Web-Based Information Acquisition for Record Matching, graduated 2011, now a Lead Scientist with NCS, Singapore.
  25. Cong Duy Vu Hoang, Automatic Related Work Summarization, graduated 2010, now a doctoral candidate at the University of Melbourne, previously Senior Research Engineer at the HLT Department, Institute of Infocomm Research (I2R), Singapore.
  26. Dr Long Qiu, Scenario Template Generation, graduated April 2009, now a research scientist at Taobao, Alibaba, China; previously a Research Fellow with the Institute of Infocomm Research (I2R), Singapore
  27. Dr Hendra Setiawan, Gapped Constituency Phrase-Based Machine Translation, graduated 2008, now with BBN Raytheon, New York, NY, previously at IBM Watson Labs, and University of Maryland.
  28. Dr Hang Cui, Soft Pattern Matching, graduated July 2006, now a Staff Software Engineer / Engineering Manager at Google, previously with Yahoo! Engineering, Google and OneRiot.

Invited Talks

I list the invited talks for past conferences, workshops and other events I have had the privilege to lecture. From 2018-2020, I am a Slides and videos for some of the talks are available on YouTube and Speakerdeck, and from a separate talks page that I maintain somewhat. I

  1. 2018 - Invited Speaker, "Research Fast and Slow", COLING, 24 Aug 2018, Santa Fe, NM, USA.
    2. [ Video @ Vimeo ]
  2. 2017 - Invited Speaker, "Technology vs Learner Engagement: Always a Tradeoff". At the innovLogue, 16 Mar 2017, Singapore, Singapore, Institute of Adult Learning.
  3. 2015 - Invited Speaker, "Instructors, Learners and Machines: Learning instructor intervention from MOOC forums". At the 2nd Greater China MOOC Symposium, Taoyuan, Taiwan, 16 August.
  4. 2015 - Keynote Speaker, "Keywords, phrases, clauses and sentences: Topicality, indicativeness and informativeness at scales". At Novel Computational Approaches to Keyphrase Extraction Workshop, Beijing, China, 30 July.
  5. 2015 - Invited Talk, "Improving Web 2.0 Recommendation Leveraging User Comments via Latent Model Regularization" -- Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China, 24 July.
  6. 2015 - Invited Talk, "Improving Web 2.0 Recommendation Leveraging User Comments via Latent Model Regularization" -- Linköping, Sweden, 27 May.
  7. 2015 - Invited Talk, "Serving the Readers of Scholarly Documents: A Grand Challenge for the Introspective Digital Library". At International Conference on Big Data and Smart Computing (BigComp 2015), Jeju Island, South Korea, 9 February.
  8. 2015 - Invited Talk, "Serving the Readers of Scholarly Documents: A Grand Challenge for the Introspective Digital Library". At the Mining Big Text (MBT '15) Workshop, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea, 10 February.
  9. 2014 - Keynote Speaker, the small data of scholarly documents, At Web Science and Data Analytics Summer School, Singapore, 11 December
  10. 2014 - Invited Keynote, Opportunities for Multimedia Analysis in Scholarly Digital Libraries. At the Workshop on Speech, Language and Audio in Multimedia (SLAM '14), Satellite Workshop of Interspeech 2014, Penang, Malaysia, 11 Sep 2014.

Research Grants and Awards

I have proposed, managed and collaborated on a number of research grants in Singapore. Here's a non-exhaustive listing of some of my research endeavors. Funding in terms of Singapore dollars, unless otherwise noted.

  1. PI, "Scholarly Document Information Extraction" - 217K (2021-2023), MOE (Tier 1), Singapore
  2. Co-PI, "AI-Lyricist: A Music-Informed Automatic Lyrics Generation System for Language Learning" - 698K (2021-2024), MOE (Tier 2), Singapore
  3. Co-PI, "Course Suggestion for Career Planning: Evaluating Strategies to Support Lifelong Learning. A Pilot on Using Analytics to Recommend SkillsFuture Credit Courses" - 161K (2018-2019), WDARF, Singapore
  4. Co-PI, "NExT++: Towards Web Intelligence and User Empowerment" - 500K (2016-2019), NRF, Singapore
  5. Collaborator, "面向课程的大规模在线教育资源组织与持续优化的 理论与方法" - 450K RMB, NSF, China
  6. PI, "Investigating Instructor Intervention in MOOC Forums" - 167K (2015-2018), NUS LIFT grant
  7. Co-PI, "NExT Search Center" - 6.1M (2010-2015), NRF MDA grant
  8. PI, "Data Mining for Supporting Critical Reviews in Evidence Based Nursing" - 98K (2010-2012)
  9. Co-PI, joint with Philip S Cho (NUS, ARI), Ben Sovacool (NUS, LKYSPP), "Mapping the Technological and cultural landscape of scientific development in Asia" - 225K (2010-2013), from Global Asia Institute
  10. PI, "Co-training NLP systems and Language Learners" - 234.5K (2008-2014) CSIDM phases I and II
  11. Co-PI, joint with Tat-Seng Chua and Chew Lim Tan (NUS) - "Interactive Media Search" - 1.9M (2007-2010), NRF MDA grant
  12. Co-PI, joint with Yin Leng Theng, Chunyan Miao (NTU), Ai Chee Tang (SMU) - "Empirical Usability Studies with E-Learning Systems: Towards Executable Cognitive User Models as Design and Usability Evaluation Aids" - 24K (2007), from A*STAR HFE pilot grant
  13. PI, "Mathematical Equation Indexing, Search and Retrieval" - 39K (2006-2007)
  14. Co-PI, joint with Chew Lim Tan and Danny Poo (NUS), "Document Information Mining for Digital Libraries" - 23K (2006-2008), from HP Labs
  15. PI, "Natural Language Query Analysis for Web Queries" - 41K (2006-2007)
  16. Recipient of 60K (2004), NUS Interdisciplinary Technology Equipment Grant
  17. PI, "Corpus-Based Query Expansion in Online Public Access Catalogs" - 31K (2003-2006)
  18. PI, "Towards multi document indicative summarization via automated metadata extraction", 23K (2003-2006)

Research Awards

  1. Microsoft Research - For research and development of a shared task and corpus on scientific document summarization (SGD 27K, 2016)
  2. NVidia - For research and development in NLP using GPU technologies - 1 GTX Titan X (USD 800, 2015)
  3. Elsevier Unrestricted Gift - For research and development of digital libraries and coordination of the Elsevier SGCodeJam24 and Code for Science (USD 2K, 2011)