Sidney Wong
He/Him, Any pronouns with respect
I am queer and I am a computational sociolinguist and community advocate.//
When I reflect on my personal and research journey, it has undoubtedly been influenced by my experience of being ‘in the closet’ as a person who is both an ethnic minority and part of the Queer community in Aotearoa New Zealand. I was fortunate on my journey that I had access to supportive mentors and communities. They have allowed me to understand how I can coalesce the different aspects of my identity.
As a sociolinguist, I am interested in how society influences language. More specifically, I use methods from corpus linguistics, natural language processing, and computational linguistics to understand the intersection of linguistic and social phenomena on social media. A common thread throughout my research is the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. This is because data by itself has little meaning without narrative or social context.
One way I’ve been using my expertise as a researcher in supporting the LGBTQ+ community is testing the efficacy of hate speech detection systems and monitoring anti-social behaviour in digital spaces as well as geographic and sociocultural biases in these systems. I’m a strong believer that data and digital technologies can be and should be used to support under-resourced communities.