2/12

안녕하세요~~~! Welcome back to my Networking Interviews! For my third interview, I will be talking with 조원익 or Wonik Cho!

Wonik and I at a Cafe!

Wonik is a recent Seoul National University grad, where he studied Electrical Engineering (EE) and Mathematics for his undergraduate and EE again for his graduate degree. Now for those of you who know me, you’re probably wondering how either of those things match up with my heavily humanities-related major. But Wonik didn’t continue with his Math and Engineering path and instead went into more Linguistics related topics during grad school, where he wrote a paper titled “Open Korean Corpora: A Practical Report” . And interestingly enough, I read this paper and cited it in my own research! So when I reached out to him and told him about it, he was more than happy to let me interview him! But how exactly did Wonik get into Linguistics from Math and Engineering?

Dating back to high school, Wonik had a lot of interests in mathematical conjectures and wanted to be one of the people to solve those unsolvable math problems. So of course, he would choose a major that incorporated that type of math: Electrical Engineering. When he started this major, he really enjoyed it, as he got to do lots of math and apply it to real life outputs. But he soon realized that it was a much harder than he initially thought and he began to struggle with the major.

During this time, he found an outlet that really helped with the stress of school: classical guitar. He’d always had a passion for music but while playing with other SNU students, his love for the instrument grew even more. So in graduate school, he decided that he would try out music to see if he could make it work for him, while still maintaining his EE major. His goal was to create a model that would transcribe music automatically from the source (separate the instruments and transcribe their notes and rhythms automatically — a crazy cool and complicated concept). This endeavor was full of trial and error and sadly didn’t end up working out fully. So he switched again to a new focus: speech engineering.

Wonik joined an EE lab that was doing research on speech engineering (speech synthesis, etc) and  he was assigned to speech understanding. this was ultimately a short-lived path for him, as, due to external factors,  he would move on to NLP (Natural Language Processing) research soon after this. He started with corpus construction and fortunately thought it was super interesting, along with other topics and thus Wonik became an NLP fan and has been doing NLP related work ever since then.

This leads us to how I came to find out about Wonik . As previously mentioned, Wonik , along with a few of his researcher friends, published  a paper titled “Open Korean Corpora: A Practical Report”, which is an in depth look at all of the available Korean Corpora and an analysis of all of them. This was actually a side project for the team and their motivation was to make an organized list of the available Korean Corpora currently online, as there are a number of useful corpora, but they are quite poorly organized. This poses a barrier to international researchers, including myself, as I mention in my own work. Wonik and his friends wanted to expand these resources outside of Korea to help popularize research on the Korean language. But there were some obstacles to this work, as there a restrictions on publicizing the corpora. But luckily, Wonik and his team were able to get around them and went on to publish the paper. It was very timely on their part as well, because at the time, there was an NLP workshop coming up soon  and there was a lot of interest in corpora at the time.

So now that we’d gotten all of the background done, I wanted to know about what Wonik is doing currently. Since he graduated last August, he has been working at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology. In addition to the NLP jobs he does in Samsung, he does his own research in the area of computational social science. I had never heard of this work so I asked him to explain it to me. According to Wonik , it’s like “analyzing social events and looking at the events and the public’s perception of the events through the view of data. -Like watching social events through language and computers”.  This is super interesting to me because I took a Corpus Linguistics class at Wellesley and we did this exact type of work, and I really enjoyed it. So I asked him to give me an example of the work he does. Currently, he said that he investigates how AI market and researchers react to new changes, specifically for products like ChatGPT and other such technology. This insight may also help him and his company make decision on how they should control their marketing tactics to ensure that their sales and usage remains high. After hearing about this work, I couldn’t stop thinking about it and asking questions, so we spent a good chunk of time talking about it haha. But that also led us on to Wonik’s own research interests.

As he’s working now, he can’t really juggle research on top of it, but he did say that he has interests in doing more research in the future, even saying that if he could, he’d do research forever, but it’s just not feasible because…well…he has to pay bills somehow. Wonik said that previously he did research on hate speech, public bias, and other social topics, so he wants to continue that research but in the future, wants to concentrate on language, society, HCI,, and how AI and NLP will play a role in it. In his words he wants to “do research on AI for social good”. I think that this is a particularly interesting and very compelling topic of research, and I’m very interested to see where he goes with it.

We talked a lot about what Wonik does and how he’s gotten to where he is, but towards the end of our interview, I wanted to hear about Wonik as a person, not as a researcher or worker. Wonik says that he’s the kind of person that thinks a lot about the meaning of words and the reason why people say what they do. He’s never liked ambiguity and thinks a lot about how to clarify the meanings of words. In contrast to this attitude towards words, Wonik  says that he’s “like water”, in that he is very flexible and willing to fit with a lot of people and accept and adapt to many methodologies. I think this willingness to adapt and accept new ideas has made his life very easy, and he agrees. When I asked him about hardships and regrets, he struggled to name any.

He said that he has had a smooth life overall without many hardships, in part due to his own personality, but also thanks to his family’s support. His home life was very stable and his parents never forced him to do one thing or another. He said that this stability really helped him succeed in life, adding that “the turbulence in academics was manageable because of the stability and support I received at home”. He said this his only regret (if you could even call it that” was that he was slightly 부럽다 about students who did linguistics from the beginning, as he had to learn a lot and catch up on the later end. But he said that even though he felt a bit behind, he believes that studying math and EE was a good experience for him because it let him look at his work and career paths from new and different perspectives. And this has helped him find the career he’s currently in, which he really enjoys.

Finally, I asked Wonik for any advice for students or recent graduates who are interested in what he does and think that his flexible personality is really well reflected in his advice.

I hope people who are interested in [Linguistics and Research] don’t restrict their career by what they’re interested in now, because they can do more than what they think. And they can always come back to what they want to do now.

Don’t be so hasty with making decisions, because there will always be something to do

–This particularly spoke to me, as I’m struggling with this exact thing right now. Before doing these interviews, and specifically before doing this interview with Wonik , I was quite stuck on one specific career path and was certain that it was the only one I could do. I felt that because I’d invested so much time into it, I had to continue with it; it was the only think I was allowed to like. But after talking to my other interviewees and to Wonik , I’ve found many new paths that I didn’t know about before. And I know that no matter what, I can always come back to the path I was so set on before, because it’s not going anywhere. I can take the time I need and make decisions on my own time, instead of racing against an imaginary clock.

Wonik previously said that he likes expressing his words well and leaving his mark through the research he does. I can confirm not only his research, but also this interview has left a very important mark on my way of thinking about my future, and I’m very grateful to him for it. Thank you again Wonik for allowing my to interview you and for listening to my concerns about my own research and future. It has been very helpful. And I look forward to going to that restaurant in 대학동 ㅎㅎㅎ.

Thank you very much for reading! My next interview will be with 신효필 교수님 (Professor Shin), a current Professor at SNU who did research on Korean as an agglutinative language, which is very heavily related to my own research! I read his work after I sent my own paper in for publication so I felt a bit 아쉽다 about it, but I can interview him about his work, which I think is even better than just citing him haha!

Until then, 건강을 조심하고 맛있는걸 잘 드세용~~!

PS- Here is what Wonik and I ate during our interview! It was a place in 강남 and it was so good!! 맛있겠? And my aesthetic coffee photo. ㅎㅎㅎ