HomeNewsDong Nguyen wins annual Overijssel PhD Award 2017

Dong Nguyen wins annual Overijssel PhD Award 2017

At the Dies Natalis celebration, Dong Nguyen received the Overijssel PhD Award 2017 for her thesis about using big data for computational text analysis of social media.

Dong Nguyen promoted in March 2017 cum laude with her thesis “Text as social and cultural data: a computational perspective on variation in text”. The digitalization of life and the increasing use of social media create big data every day. Nguyen used those digital datasets to study social and cultural phenomena as the use of language and behavior.

Her dissertation explored computational approaches for text analysis and focused on the two areas computational sociolinguistics, the study of language in relation to social factors, and computational folkloristics, the study of folklore. The online program TweetGenie which was developed for this thesis was able to predict age and gender of Twitter users based on the posted content. Another outcome of her study was that the tweets also gave insights on geographical language variations.

Dong Nguyen

During her PhD-research at the University of Twente, Nguyen was part of the Human Media Interaction group, the research institute CTIT, and the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science. Her current postdoc position with a prestigious and highly selective scholarship in the Alan Turing fellowship programme shows the international recognition of her work.

The Overijssel PhD Award is an annual prize from the province of Overijssel, for an excellent dissertation. The prize, consisting of a certificate and 5,000 euros, was awarded during the Dies Natalis of the University of Twente.