Yongfu's Blog

Yongfu Liao

Children's Hearing Foundation

I share my inspirations here, mostly stemming from the activities I enjoy. It started as a place to document programming-related knowledge and open-source projects I worked on. These days, I also write about statistics, books, and occasional reflections.

I began my programming journey with R in 2017, and it has since scaffolded my way up in exploring new things. I was excited by this new world back then and soon found myself drawn to other languages. First, it was Python, then JavaScript and web development. I think I’ve now settled on R.

In my current position, I mostly work on Bayesian modeling (using R and Stan) in applied research settings, such as developing assessment tools for children. I also occasionally build web applications to help integrate research findings into the rehabilitation services offered at our institute. Outside of work, I enjoy hiking and traveling to distant towns.

I’ll begin my graduate studies in Cognitive Psychology at Syracuse University in August 2025.

Research Interests

Bayesian (Cognitive) Modeling
Assessment
Open Science

Education

M.A. in Linguistics, 2022
National Taiwan University
B.S. in Psychology, 2019
National Taiwan University

Publications

Liao, Y., Chia-Ying, C., & Hung, Y.-C. (2024, October 26–27). From Lexical Diversity to Latent Ability: Estimating Child Language Ability from Natural Speech Samples [Conference presentation abstract]. The 63rd Annual Convention of Taiwanese Psychological Association. https://drive.google.com/file/d/103Xb-p1Wgu9MO9L9fBT4PvnxHN26cPSZ

Liao, Y. (2022). Glyph-based Corpus Analysis: A Toolkit for Sub-character Analysis of Chinese Corpora [Master’s thesis, National Taiwan University]. http://dx.doi.org/10.6342/NTU202200369

Chang, Y.-L., Liao, Y., Wang, P.-Y. A., Ku, M.-C., & Hsieh, S.-K. (2021). Keyword-centered collocating topic analysis. Proceedings of the 33rd Conference on Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing (ROCLING 2021), 310–317. https://aclanthology.org/2021.rocling-1.40

Hsieh, S.-K., Tseng, Y.-H., Chiang, C.-Y., Lian, R., Liao, Y., Ku, M.-C., & Shih, C.-F. (2020). From sense to action: A word-action disambiguation task in NLP. Proceedings of the 34th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, 107–112. https://aclanthology.org/2020.paclic-1.13

Liao, Y., & Hsieh, S.-K. (2020). Mitigating impacts of word segmentation errors on collocation extraction in Chinese. Proceedings of the 32nd Conference on Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing (ROCLING 2020), 8–20. https://aclanthology.org/2020.rocling-1.4