About Me
Dr. Qi Li is an assistant professor of Computer Science at Iowa State University. She is broadly interested in data mining, natural language processing, and machine learning, especially in information extraction, data management for crowdsourcing, and weakly supervised machine learning. She is an NSF Career winner.
Example Research Projects
Some of the research projects REU students can work on with me include:
Information Extraction
Information extraction in natural language processing (NLP) is the process of automatically extracting structured information from unstructured data, such as text and images. Information extraction involves identifying specific entities, relationships, and events of interest in text data, such as named entities like chemical names and properties, and converting them into a structured format that can be analyzed and used for various applications. Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT can read a lot, but do they have enough domain-specific knowledge to understand scientific publications? Potential research avenues include:
- Evaluating LLMs’ ability to comprehend chemistry publications and recognize chemical mentions in text or images
- Fine-tuning LLMs for IE.
Success in the project
Be willing to read and write. This project requires a lot of reading to evaluate the LLMs’ ability.
Ideal skills:
- Ability to read and write scientific reports (better than LLMs).
- Well organized.
- Ability to think critically about problems.
- A strong math/statistic background.
Willing to learn (if you don’t know them already):
- Python, calling LLM APIs, and deploying open-sourced LLMs.
- MongoDB and Neo4J. These two databases will store and organize text documents and knowledge graphs
These research projects are joint research efforts with (TODO: list other REU mentors here).