Assoc. Prof. Dr. Wirote Aroonmanakun from the Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, an Expert in Thai Corpus and Language Processing, Awarded the 2023 National Outstanding Researcher Award in Philosophy

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Wirote Aroonmanakun, Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, and Director of the Sirindhorn Thai Language Institute, was awarded the National Outstanding Researcher Award 2023 in Philosophy from the National Research Council of Thailand (NRCT) for his expertise in Thai corpus and language processing research. His work incorporated a large amount of Thai language data collection to generate a Thai language search engine, which is available on the Thai Concordance website. He also participated in the development project of the national Thai corpus by designing the corpus and developing the tools to parse and tag texts and collect data for the corpus.

Apart from the Thai corpus, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Wirote also collaborated with lecturers in the English Department to develop and generate a corpus comparing English-Thai texts for those interested in translation to access and search for examples in translation. These corpuses are open to the public to provide a central source of information for researchers and students. His works were not only published as articles and books, but also made available as public tools, such as the Thai to Roman letters program, the Thai parsing program, the Thai to IPA program, the word category tagging program, the basic discursive unit identification program, and the Thai word2vec program. Currently, these programs have been incorporated in the Python Package TLTK (Thai Language Toolkit), which can be installed and used by the general public. Additional modules in Thai language processing are being continuously developed.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Wirote said that these corpuses will be beneficial as a source for researchers and students for their own research. These tools and programs have been used by private companies and organizations, as well as system developers, for over 10 years.

“Success of research comes from good teamwork. Everyone must contribute as a team. To succeed in research, you must work with something that really interests you, which will allow you to spend a lot of time on the research. Once you start, you will see the problems that will pave the way for further study. Research is like satisfying your thirst for knowledge, making you happy to learn more about that topic, rather than something you do only for the result,” remarked Assoc. Prof. Dr. Wirote as a message to the younger generation of researchers.

For more information on the Thai corpus and language processing, visit https://www.arts.chula.ac.th/ling/tnc3/.

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