RESEARCH & NOTES

Language systems,
studied in use.

I build systems for language and creative work. These studies examine what changes when people use them; my next question concerns creative intentions that change during collaboration.

01 / SELECTED RESEARCH

Three studies. Different responsibilities.

Figure 5, published Sinolingo paper · task 1 / task 2 comparison

Figure 5, published Sinolingo paper · task 1 / task 2 comparison

First authorPublished

Can a translation platform support learning as well as output?

First author; contributed to the translation platform and the study reported in the paper.

Method
30 translation undergraduates completed three stages: conventional tools, Sinolingo, then a new task after one month of autonomous use. Outputs were compared with BLEU, chrF++ and BERTScore.
Finding
The paper reports BLEU 21.4 → 28.9, chrF++ 48.7 → 56.2 and BERTScore 0.812 → 0.864 from the first to second task.
Paper details & limitations

The Construction of the “Sinolingo” Platform and a Study on Its Effectiveness in Autonomous Translation Learning

Mingkai Li, Qiaoxi Huang, Jinwen Hu, Renjia Chen, Menglian Liu & Xingyu Pu

ETMIS 2025 · Atlantis Press · 2026

A small, single-institution study with sequential tasks and a short intervention. These are task-level findings, not proof of lasting learning for all students.

Published paper, Figure 1 · the corpus management interface

Published paper, Figure 1 · the corpus management interface

Second authorPublished · EI Compendex

What makes a bilingual corpus useful in translation practice?

Second author and project team member; contributed to corpus-platform development.

Method
News collection, translation, automatic alignment and human review produced 11,000 sentence pairs. A six-week evaluation compared 32 Vietnamese-major students, with 16 in each group.
Finding
Reported alignment accuracy: 96.5%. Mean post-test translation scores were 89.1 with corpus-supported practice and 82.4 in the comparison group.
Paper details & limitations

Construction and Application of a Vietnamese-Chinese Parallel Corpus for Political News

Xiaoxin Chen, Mingkai Li, Wenjing Liu, Xiaoyun Liu, Ke Wang & Menglian Liu

DEIT 2026 · ACM ICPS

One cohort, a short intervention and political-news texts. The result does not establish gains across other domains or long-term retention.

Current Echoo public website, October 2026 · a later product version, not the experiment interface

Current Echoo public website, October 2026 · a later product version, not the experiment interface

Fourth authorAccepted with minor revisions · editorial production pending

When do visual cues help an interpreter?

Fourth author; developed the real-time subtitles, trigger-based highlighting and supporting audio/transcription services.

Method
19 postgraduate trainee interpreters worked with and without highlighting in both Chinese–English directions. The study assessed accuracy, fluency, cognitive load and user acceptance.
Finding
The manuscript reports higher accuracy and lower perceived load. Trigger-specific gains were significant for proper nouns and terms, but not for lists or numbers.
Paper details & limitations

Human-centred, augmented simultaneous interpreting: supporting trainees with trigger-based highlighting

W. Su, Z. Chen, B. Zhu, M. Li & D. Li

Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies

Prepared trigger pairs, controlled speeches and a small trainee sample. My contribution was the supporting software, not leadership of the full experimental design.

02 / PROPOSED RESEARCH

When should an agent reopen a creative direction?

RESEARCH PROPOSAL · OCTOBER 2026

Adaptive Creative Agents for Evolving User Intent

Preference-guided generation can refine what a person already likes. My proposed study asks what happens when later feedback challenges those earlier choices: should the agent clarify, explore alternatives, or keep refining?

The mechanism to test

Separate fixed product facts, confirmed creative decisions and provisional preferences. Compare a preference model that can reconsider earlier choices with cumulative and recency-weighted baselines; evaluate action selection separately.

How I would evaluate it

One session, one product visual. Compare the same models and budget across a conversational agent, fixed workflow, preference-guided baseline and adaptive method. Evaluate novelty, usefulness, factual fidelity, control and ownership; use ablations to isolate the two mechanisms.

This is a planned study. Interviews and a pilot would refine the protocol and sample size; the interactive sketch below has not been evaluated with participants.

Research context & scope

The proposal builds on preference adaptation and adaptive elicitation, while focusing on reconsidering earlier choices and deciding when to reopen exploration. The initial scope excludes video, multi-agent architectures and long-term personalisation.

03 / TRY THE QUESTION

What should the agent do next?

Ceramic cup — selected visual directionPREPARED MATERIAL · CONCEPT DEMO

One product. A changing intention.

01 / CHOOSE A STARTING POINT

How should this feel?

02 / CHANGE YOUR MIND03 / COMPARE THE RESPONSES

Choose a direction, then introduce the new brief to compare three agent behaviours.

Prepared brochure imagery and fixed branches. This illustrates interaction choices, not evaluated model performance.

04 / FIELD NOTES

Questions I brought back from building.