Jey Han Lau

Jey Han Lau

Senior Lecturer
School of Computing and Information Systems
The University of Melbourne

My field of research is in Natural Language Processing (NLP) — a sub-field of Artificial Intelligence — and the goal of NLP is to develop computational models to understand human languages. There are a host of NLP applications that are commonly used in our everyday lives: machine translation (e.g. Google Translate) and chatbot (e.g. Siri) are two examples. My research focuses on building computational models in an unsupervised or semi-supervised setting, i.e. a learning scenario where the supervision signal for model training is not available or scarce, and is characterised by a diverse flavour of applications, e.g. topic models, lexical semantics, text generation and misinformation detection. Some of my research has a broader community interest beyond academia — e.g. my work in text generation and influence operations has been covered by science magazines (New Scientist) and mainstream news media (Guardian and BBC).

Prior to joining the University of Melbourne, I spent over 3.5 years as an industry scientist at IBM Research, developing solutions for clients in application domains from education to government.

Affiliations: The University of Melbourne’s NLP Group and Information and Influence Hub.

Prospective Students

  • If your query is related PhD supervision, it would help to: (1) have a look over my publications to identify areas of overlapping interests; and (2) send a thoughtful research proposal to suggest potential projects. As a student I don’t expect that you have a perfect understanding of the gaps in the field and can identify research questions that fit the scope of a PhD, but the proposal would serve to kickstart a discussion about potential project ideas.
  • If your query is about internship, please note that I do not take interns (and so any queries of this nature would not receive a response).

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