About Me
About
I am an MA by Research student in Linguistics at the National University of Singapore (NUS). My work focuses on Cantonese and Yue varieties, especially language contact, dialectal variation, romanization, and the digital infrastructure needed for under-resourced Sinitic languages.
My academic interests are grounded in descriptive and historical linguistics, but much of my work also involves computational methods: collecting and cleaning corpus data, organizing lexical resources, building dictionary infrastructure, and developing tools that make Cantonese and Yue data easier to search, type, annotate, and share.
Research Interests
- Cantonese and Yue linguistics
- Language contact and dialectal variation in Guangxi and Guangdong
- Romanization and transcription for Yue varieties
- Corpus building and lexical data organization
- Language technology for under-resourced languages
Computational Methods
I use technical skills as research infrastructure rather than as a separate research identity. My work has involved:
- collecting, cleaning, and structuring web-based Chinese and Cantonese text data
- building Python workflows for corpus parsing, filtering, and lexical data preparation
- developing dictionary and input-method resources for Cantonese and Pan-Cantonese projects
- supporting open-source language technology projects with Git-based collaborative workflows
Selected Projects
- TypeDuck: Cantonese input method and multilingual dictionary project.
- Jyutping++: extended romanization and transcription work for Yue varieties.
- CanCLID: Cantonese computational linguistics infrastructure.
- Lingnaam Jyutjam: community work on Cantonese phonetics, phonology, and lexical resources.
Contact
- NUS Email: zinan.liang@u.nus.edu
- Personal Email: liangzinan21@hotmail.com
- GitHub: TsinamLeung