Oral Defence Passed!

Today, I have passed the oral defence of my thesis titled Learning Semantics from Meaning Representations: From Distributional and Graph-Grammatical Perspectives!

While I am excited to share with you the thesis, it is yet to be revised and made accessible. I decide to post the Acknowledgement here:

Looking back on the leap of faith when I applied for the PhD program, I could never have imagined being the author of this thesis. It has been a journey, albeit tough!

I would like to thank my supervisor Hong Cheng, without whom undertaking the studies would not have been possible in the first place. You have given me the freedom, resources, and encouragement to research on topics that I find interesting. I want to thank Wai Lam for your expertise knowledge and resourceful guidance on polishing my publications. I should also thank my examiners Helen Meng, Sibo Wang, and Jing Jiang for your questions and thoughtful feedback.

I have to thank Guy Emerson from Cambridge, with whom I have had many fruitful discussions during remote calls, in-person chats, and not to mention on the DELPH-IN Discourse forum. I am thankful for the opportunity to attend and present at the DELPH-IN Summit, which would not have been an event in any possible world I could envision. It has been a pleasure to collaborate with you. I would also love to thank Sunny Lai, who opened the door of computational linguistics to me and aided my first steps in research.

I am grateful to my friends in and out of CUHK for always being there for me. You have added colours to my life outside of research. While it is impossible to list everyone here, I want to especially thank my PhD classmates Zijin Feng and Luyang Lin for your company through tears and laughter, and Wai Chung Kwan for the fun and thought-provoking exchanges in Toronto. I should also thank Justin Wang-Lap Tang, who has always shown an interest in my research ideas and patience with listening to my mumble about them.

I am in CUHK’s debt (at least idiomatically) for enjoying my eight years of university life on this lovely campus and meeting many great people here. If I am allowed to, I must also give credit to music, which has accompanied and healed me through the darkest hours. Finally, I would like to thank my loving grandma and parents for giving me the privilege to pursue a PhD. Your dedicated and unconditional support has been converted into my effort in writing every word of this thesis.