TEAL Digital Scholarship Series 2025-26: When NLP Meets Korean Language Education

The Tateuchi East Asia Library (TEAL) is proud to present the 2025-2026 TEAL Digital Scholarship Series, a dynamic program showcasing cutting-edge research by scholars in the fields of Chinese, Japanese and Korean studies. This series highlights how innovative digital tools and methodologies are transforming East Asian scholarship, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue, and broadening the impact of research within and beyond academia.

When NLP Meets Korean Language Education

Dr. Sanghoun Song, Associate Professor, Korea University

Abstract:
As K-culture such as K-pop and K-drama continues to gain worldwide popularity, Korean has emerged as one of the most widely studied foreign languages across many countries. Meanwhile, Natural Language Processing has advanced rapidly, with AI-powered solutions achieving remarkable success in diverse fields. Yet these two developments have not fully converged. Leveraging NLP techniques can offer significant benefits for foreign language teaching and learning, particularly for languages like Korean that have traditionally lacked abundant pedagogical resources. This talk examines how NLP can be harnessed for Korean language instruction, highlighting available linguistic resources and presenting practical strategies for classroom integration.

Bio:
Dr. Sanghoun Song is Associate Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Research Institute of Language and Information at Korea University. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Washington, specializing in grammar engineering for multilingual machine translation. He has held research and teaching positions at NiCT (Japan), NTU (Singapore), and Incheon National University (Korea). His work includes computational syntax and semantics, as well as domain-specific models. In recent years, he has been actively conducting research on the interplay between linguistics and large language models, with an emphasis on linguistic evaluation, experimental testing, and the societal impacts of language technology.