Min-Yen Kan (靳民彦)
Min's picture
 School of Computing

Min-Yen Kan (靳民彦)

Associate Professor

Vice Dean, Undergraduate Studies
CV    Google Scholar    LinkedIn    X    YouTube
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

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 the Centre for Trusted Internet and Community (CTIC) and the NUS-Tsinghua Extreme Search Centre (NExT). WING also was previously affiliated with the China Singapore Institute of Digital Media (CSIDM), when it existed, from 2008 to 2013.

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

Conversely, if you're currently doing an independent study course (such as 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 Student Cohort

My group's website is most authoritative for lists of my current and past research students. Here's a snapshot from 2025. WING's website also lists all 100+ alumni, inclusive of over 40+ postgraduate alumni.

Current Students

Doctoral Students

  1. Yajing YangYajing Yang - IPP Doctoral Student (Aug '20). Research interests: Data-to-Text Generation, Table Reasoning, Large Language Models.
  2. Yisong MiaoYisong Miao - Doctoral Student (Jan '21). Research interests: Discourse Semantics, Lexical Semantics.
  3. Yuxi XieYuxi Xie - Doctoral Student (Jan '21). Research interests: Multi-Step Reasoning and Text Generation, Vision-Language Understanding and Reasoning, Self-Improvement for Large Foundation Models.
  4. Minzhi Li (Ella)Minzhi Li (Ella) - A*STAR Doctoral Student (Aug '22). Research interests: Socially Aware NLP Systems, Human-Centric and Data-Centric NLP.
  5. Tongyao ZhuTongyao Zhu - IPP Doctoral Student (Jan '23; SEA). Research interests: Retrieval Augmentation in LLMs, Memory & Knowledge in LLMs.
  6. Xuan Long DoXuan Long Do - A*STAR Doctoral Student (Aug '23). Co-Supervised by Kenji Kawaguchi. Research interests: Efficient (Self-)Adaptation, Alignment, Multi-agent System.
  7. Esther GanEsther Gan - Doctoral Student (Aug '23). Co-Supervised by Michael Shieh. Research interests: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Reasoning, Prompting / Prompt Engineering.
  8. Sahajpreet SinghSahajpreet Singh - CTIC Doctoral Student (Jan '25). Co-Supervised by Kokil Jaidka. Research interests: Trustworthy and Safe Internet, Misleading Content and Propaganda.
  9. Ruiwen ZhouRuiwen Zhou - Doctoral Student (Aug '25). Research interests: LLM Reasoning, AI Agents.

Master Students

  1. Jiecheng JiangJiecheng Jiang - Master Student (Aug '25). Research interests: LLM Alignment, LLM Ethics.
  2. Nura TamtonNura Tamton - Master Student (Aug '25). Research interests: AI/ML, LLMs/RAGs.

Undergraduate Students

  1. Haomeng LuHaomeng Lu - UROP Student (Jan '25). Research interests: Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Audio Information Retrieval.
  2. Sahej AgarwalSahej Agarwal - UROP Student (Jan '25). Research interests: Natural Language Processing, Multilingual and Cross-lingual NLP.
  3. Jiahao ChenJiahao Chen - UROP Student (Aug '25). Research interests: Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing.
  4. Rui Feng CheongRui Feng Cheong - ISC Student (Aug '25). Research interests: Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing.
  5. Chao Ming HuangChao Ming Huang - FYP Student (Aug '25). Research interests: Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning.
  6. Glenda Chong Rui TingGlenda Chong Rui Ting - FYP Student (Aug '25). Research interests: Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing.
  7. Jonathan PuaJonathan Pua - FYP Student (Aug '25). Research interests: Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing.
  8. Wei Hern LimWei Hern Lim - FYP Student (Aug '25). Research interests: Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Reasoning.
  9. Zizhen LiZizhen Li - FYP Student (Aug '25). Research interests: Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing.

For the most up-to-date information including photos and detailed profiles, please visit our group's website.

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

Invited Talks

I list the invited talks for past conferences, workshops and other events I have had the privilege to lecture.

2025

Schloss Dagstuhl Talk, "Research Fast and Slow, Dagstuhl 25831 (10m version)", at the Schloss Dagstuhl, 16 Sep 2025, Dagstuhl, Germany.

Slides @ Google Slides.

Invited Talk, "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Getting more out of LLM Prompting", at the ITU:Summer School on NLP, 26 Jul 2025, Linz, Austria.

Slides @ Google Drive

Invited Talk, "AI in Education and Research", at NUS Transforming University Libraries Leadership & Innovation Programme (NUS TULLIP), 8 Jan 2025, Singapore.

Slides @ Google Drive.

2024

Invited Talk, "Pre-mortem: UnF.A.I.R - the Death of Open Research (Singapore Open Research Conference Keynote)", Singapore Open Research Conference 2024, Singapore.

Slides @ Google Drive

Invited Talk, "Why Share Data? Conversation on a Professor's Data Sharing Journey & Research Data Management", Researcher Unbound Series, NUS Libraries, at the National University of Singapore, Singapore.

2022

Keynote Speaker, "Scholarly Document Processing Research in the Age of AI", 17 Oct 2022, Gyeongju, South Korea, Scholarly Document Processing Workshop at COLING 2022.
Slides @ SpeakerDeck.

2018

Keynote Speaker, "Research Fast and Slow", COLING, 24 Aug 2018, Santa Fe, NM, USA. Slides @ Google Slides.

Older Talks

  1. 2017 - Invited Speaker, "Technology vs Learner Engagement: Always a Tradeoff". At the innovLogue, 16 Mar 2017, Singapore, Singapore, Institute of Adult Learning.
  2. 2015 - Invited Speaker, "Instructors, Learners and Machines: Learning instructor intervention from MOOC forums". At the 2nd Greater China MOOC Symposium, Taoyuan, Taiwan, 16 August.
  3. 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.
  4. 2015 - Invited Talk, "Improving Web 2.0 Recommendation Leveraging User Comments via Latent Model Regularization" -- Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China, 24 July.
  5. 2015 - Invited Talk, "Improving Web 2.0 Recommendation Leveraging User Comments via Latent Model Regularization" -- Linköping, Sweden, 27 May.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 2014 - Keynote Speaker, the small data of scholarly documents, At Web Science and Data Analytics Summer School, Singapore, 11 December
  9. 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, in reverse chronological order. Funding in terms of Singapore dollars, unless otherwise noted. Larger grants (1M+) are bolded.

  1. PI, "Automating Community Note Generation for Social Media Misinformation Governance" - 100K (2025-2026), MOE (Tier 1), Singapore
  2. Collaborator, "Unveiling Country Trade: Insights from 19th century Batavia Kong Koan Records via OCR and NLP Analysis" - 80K (2024-2026), CSSH Seed Fund, Singapore
  3. PI, "CheckUp: Grounding Social Media on Healthcare with Science" - 100K (2024-2026), SoC Seed Funding, Singapore
  4. Co-PI, "AI Centre for Education Technologies" - 4.5M (2023-2025), AI Singapore, Singapore
  5. Co-PI, "Digital Information Resilience: Restoring Trust and Nudging Behaviours in Digitalisation" - 23M, MOE Tier 3 , Singapore
  6. Co-PI, "SingaKids Pic2Speak: Multilingual AI Tutor - Uplifting Singapore's Bilingual Edge" - 3.5M (2023-2025), NRF AI in Education Grand Challenge, Singapore
  7. PI, "Towards Controllable Generation for Scientific Document Summarization" - 241K (2024-2025), MOE (Tier 1), Singapore
  8. PI, "Scholarly Document Information Extraction" - 217K (2021-2023), MOE (Tier 1), Singapore
  9. Co-PI, "AI-Lyricist: A Music-Informed Automatic Lyrics Generation System for Language Learning" - 698K (2021-2024), MOE (Tier 2), Singapore
  10. 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
  11. Co-PI, "NExT++: Towards Web Intelligence and User Empowerment" - 500K (2016-2019), NRF, Singapore
  12. 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
  13. PI, "Investigating Instructor Intervention in MOOC Forums" - 167K (2015-2018), NUS LIFT grant
  14. Co-PI, "NExT Search Center" - 6.1M (2010-2015), NRF MDA grant
  15. PI, "Data Mining for Supporting Critical Reviews in Evidence Based Nursing" - 98K (2010-2012)
  16. 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
  17. PI, "Co-training NLP systems and Language Learners" - 234.5K (2008-2014) CSIDM phases I and II
  18. Co-PI, joint with Tat-Seng Chua and Chew Lim Tan (NUS) - "Interactive Media Search" - 1.9M (2007-2010), NRF MDA grant
  19. 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
  20. PI, "Mathematical Equation Indexing, Search and Retrieval" - 39K (2006-2007)
  21. Co-PI, joint with Chew Lim Tan and Danny Poo (NUS), "Document Information Mining for Digital Libraries" - 23K (2006-2008), from HP Labs
  22. PI, "Natural Language Query Analysis for Web Queries" - 41K (2006-2007)
  23. Recipient of 60K (2004), NUS Interdisciplinary Technology Equipment Grant
  24. PI, "Corpus-Based Query Expansion in Online Public Access Catalogs" - 31K (2003-2006)
  25. PI, "Towards multi document indicative summarization via automated metadata extraction", 23K (2003-2006)

Corporate 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)