Thien Huu Nguyen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oregon, part of the College of Arts and Sciences. His research focuses on advancing natural language processing through deep learning approaches, with particular emphasis on multilingual capabilities and information extraction systems. Dr. Nguyen earned his B.S. in Computer Science from Hanoi University of Science and Technology, followed by M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from New York University, where he worked with Professors Ralph Grishman and Kyunghyun Cho. He completed postdoctoral research at the University of Montréal with Professor Yoshua Bengio at the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms. His research explores mechanisms to understand human languages for computers so that they can perform cognitive language-related tasks. He is especially interested in distilling structured information and mining useful knowledge from massive and multilingual human-written text across various domains. His lab employs and designs effective learning algorithms for information extraction and text mining, with current focus on deep learning approaches. They are among the first groups to develop deep learning models demonstrating effectiveness for information extraction, while also targeting other language-related problems including reading comprehension, machine translation, natural language generation, chatbots, and language grounding. Dr. Nguyen's research has resulted in significant contributions to multilingual NLP, including the development of Vistral (a state-of-the-art conversational LLM for Vietnamese), CulturaX (a massive multilingual dataset with 6.3 trillion tokens in 167 languages), and the Okapi framework for evaluating multilingual LLMs in 26 languages. His work has been adopted by major organizations including Stability AI for training their state-of-the-art multilingual language models. NSF CAREER Award (2023) AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Honorable Mention in NLP (2022) EACL 2021 Best Demo Paper Award EACL 2021 Outstanding Demo Paper Award IBM Ph.D. Fellowship (2016) Dr. Nguyen actively mentors students, currently supervising four PhD students (Minh Nguyen, Nghia Ngo, Hieu Man, and Chien Nguyen) and has successfully guided numerous alumni to positions at leading tech companies and academic institutions. His research has been supported by multiple grants including funding from NSF, IARPA, and Adobe Research. He leads the UO-NLP research group which has developed influential software including FourIE (a neural information extraction system), Trankit (a multilingual NLP toolkit), and FAMIE (a multilingual active learning framework).
