Simon Shih

MA, Class of 2011

1. When did you graduate?

I graduated at 2011 and continue researching computational linguistics at NTU.

2. What was your thesis topic? Why did you choose it?

My thesis, co-advised by Michael Tanangkingsing and Shu-Kai Hsieh, performed some experiments on domain WSD (Word Sense Disambiguation) based on Chinese Wordnet, a machine-readable lexical database that groups words into cognitive synonyms.

WSD is an AI-complete problem that intrigues me. Researchers working with WSD assign senses to polysemous words (words with more than one meaning) in particular sentences, using some sense inventory like WordNet. I chose WSD as my thesis topic following my RA work at Academia Sinica. The work is based on the SemEval-2010 shared task of domain adaptation of WSD systems. I experimented with some domain keyword lists to improve the accuracy rate of correctly assigning senses to words in environmental texts.

3. What’s your favorite thing about the program at Taipei Tech?

I felt happy at taking courses I wanted. In this program I could choose to learn whatever I liked to help me reach my goal. Not only did I learn critical thinking in the English courses and take specialized linguistic courses, I also took three courses outside of the English department. I learned my appetite for science and critical thinking from the course Rhetoric of Science, I took statistics from the Electronic Department and Graduate Institute of Vocational Education, and I also took C language and Linux from the Computer Science Department.