In Meet the Team series we introduce our audience to the brilliant people working at MediaFutures. Get to know us better by discovering who we are and what we do.
This week we are interviewing Huiling You, PhD candidate, associated with Work Package 5 – Norwegian Language Technologies.

Can you give an introduction of yourself and your scientific background? 

My name is Huiling You. I am a PhD student at University of Oslo and MediaFutures. I was born and raised in a costal city called Quanzhou, in Southern China. My hometown is famous for being one of the major hubs of commerce and exchange along the Maritime Silk Roads. I obtained my BA in English Language at Nanjing University, China, and MA in Language Technology at Uppsala University, Sweden. Shortly after finishing my master’s degree in June 2021, I moved to Norway in September and started my PhD position at the University of Oslo.

Tell us about your research at MediaFutures and your role in Work Package 5.

In WP5, we work on Norwegian Language Technology, which includes several NLP tasks. My research focuses on event extraction from news articles. My goal is to develop efficient neural models that can automatically extract events from texts, news articles in particular. The number of news articles being delivered per day is beyond imagination, and not a single person can read them all. We aim at building useful tools that can be applied in real-life scenarios, especially for the news houses (e.g. industry partners of MediaFutures).

Things about MediaFutures you appreciate the most? 

I really love the working environment, although I am based in Oslo and only briefly visited Bergen during the annual meeting. With 5 Work Packages, MediaFutures has gathered a large and diversified group of researchers with various scientific backgrounds. There’s a lot of potential for collaboration. Another advantage of working at MediaFutures is the access to rich resources provided by industry partners, in particular data. What’s more, with the insights from industry partners, our research is more grounded in real-world problems.