Chia-Wei Lin

I am a doctoral assistant (assistante diplômée) and PhD candidate at the Université de Lausanne in the Section de langues et civilisations slaves et de l’Asie du Sud, working under the supervision of Prof. Ingo Strauch. My dissertation, The Buddha’s Journey to the West — Barlaam and Josaphat in the Eurasian Linguistic Context, traces how a Buddhist life-of-the-Buddha narrative travelled across Sanskrit, Middle Persian, Arabic, Georgian, Greek, and Latin, and what its many translations reveal about contact between the linguistic traditions of Eurasia.

My broader research sits at the intersection of historical linguistics, philology, digital humanities and computational linguistics. My research interests include Indo-European, Semitic and Trans-Himalayan historical linguistics, languages of Caucasus, languages of Southeast Asia, history of linguistics and mathematics, Buddhist and Christian translations on the Silk Road.

As a computational linguist, I am especitiially interested Natural Language Processing (NLP) for low-resource historical langua and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Handwrttiten Text Recognition (HTR) for non-Latin scripts languages. Currently, I am building datasets and NLP pipelines for Old Georgian, Pali, and Tangut. I have built an Old Georgian Universal Dependencies Treebank together with Dr. Diego Luinetti, and LCDTT: Lausanne Corpus of Digital Tangut Texts together with Zhang Longyu.

Before joining the Université de Lausanne, I received double MA degrees in Indo-European Linguistics and Semitic Philology at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, and a BA in Classical Philology and Classical Indology at Heidelberg.

I speak fluent German, French, and English at work. My native languages are Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese Hokkien. I have a working knowledge of Japanese and Italian. As a proud resident of Switzerland, I have set myself a side quest to learn as much Romansh and Swiss German as I can during my contract.

In my free time, I enjoy learning new languages, mathematics, and computer science. I have organised several online reading groups for mathematics and for ancient languages with friends: Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, Arabic, Classical Tibetan, Tangut, Old Georgian, Classical Armenian, Syriac, and Pali. Simply send me an email if you are interested in joining!