Welcome to my Linguistics research portfolio and project page, where I nerd out about linguistics!

My first exposure to formal Linguistics came from attending Ohio State's Summer Linguistics for Youth Institute (SLIYS, pronounced "slice") in the summer before my sophomore year. Before then, I'd always been passionate about language, but I had no idea that language could be studied as a science.

At SLIYS, I discovered the field of computational linguistics. "If a machine has to do X in order to perform this linguistic task, do humans have X characteristic as well?" This really fascinated me because - and this will probably seem obvious - human language can inform machines, but machines can inform human language as well. I thought about diagnosing the human condition, and how I could do that as a linguist.

At the same time, I was also becoming more interested in translation. As I learned Chinese and French in more depth, I would play around with expressing the same sentiment in multiple languages. Some languages like French are really fun for playing around with sense and reference - the word "conscience" in French means "consciousness" and "conscience" - while other languages are much more rigid. While satisfying my own urge for expression, as a translator, I could help others express their meaning.

In my sophomore year, I started taking NACLO more seriously, studying and doing practice problems leading up to the contest. My efforts paid off - I qualified for the Invitational Round!

Sophomore year was also when I started to get more into competitive programming. I especially loved CP problems that involved manipulating strings or that dealt with language in some capacity. However, when talking with my friends back home in China, I realized a lot of them found competitive programming - and programming in general - difficult due to the language barrier. Not only were they learning a whole new language (programming), they were also doing so in English instead of their mother tongue!

This was a struggle my dad also faced in his line of work as a clinical analyst. I thought about how I could bridge this gap with my programming and translation experience - creating coding tutorials in other languages? Writing CP problems in Chinese?