Prof. Dr. Thanaruk Theeramunkong
Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology, Thammasat University, Thailand
Title: Natural Language Processing in Thai: Past, Present and Future
Abstract:
Processing Thai language is difficult due to its complex writing system, sophisticated phonological systems, and flexible syntactic structures, such as optional vowel marking, no word-boundary marking, no sentence-boundary marking, existence of tonal variant, flexible word composition and flexible grammar structure. So far, three comprehensive surveys on Thai language processing have been provided by Sornlertlamvanich et al. (2000) and by Koanantakool et al. (2009) and Kawtrakul and Praneetpolgrang (2014). This talk summarizes the state of the art on research and development in Thai language processing, starting from machine translation, information retrieval and information extraction, speech recognition and synthesis, optical character recognition, text categorization, text summarization, and text sentimental analysis. Moreover, three Thai corpora; a named-entity-tagged corpus, an emotional speech corpus, and a tree-bank corpus, are described and their potential applications are discussed.
Biography
Thanaruk Theeramunkong is currently a professor at School of Information, Computer and Communication Technology at Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology (SIIT) at Thammasat University, Bangkok, Thailand. He is also the Program Director of Information and Communication Technology for Embedded Systems (ICTES) at TAIST Tokyo Tech, National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA). He received his bachelor degree in Electric and Electronics Engineering, master and doctoral degrees in Computer Science from Tokyo Institute of Technology. He was a research associate at Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Japan and a MIS manager at C.P. Seven Eleven Public Co., Ltd. in Thailand. He got several awards, including the Very Good Research Award in engineering field from Thammasat University in 2008, 2009 and 2010. Recently, in 2014, he has received the National Outstanding Researcher Award in the field of Information Technology and Communication Arts. He also got several best paper awards from conferences and societies, including the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, PAKDD workshops, and KICSS. In 2015, he also got a Gold Medal with the Congratulations of the Jury from the 43rd International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva for the inventions of automatic semantic-based multi-document summarization and application to public hearing. His research interests are natural language processing, data mining, text mining, machine learning and applications to service science. He is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Pacific-Asia Conferences on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD). He is an associate editor of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE). He is the author of more than 40 papers in a number of journals with impact factors and more than 100 conference papers.