Li Tan
Senior Machine Learning Research Engineer at Apple
Singapore
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolLi Tan is a Senior Machine Learning Research Engineer with 12 years of experience building production NLP and MT systems across Apple, Amazon, and Rakuten, blending deep linguistic training with hands-on engineering. He has shipped in-house translation engines for e-commerce search, developed quality-evaluation and ROI simulation tools for MT, and spearheaded data-harvesting and corpus-building efforts that power real-world pipelines. An active open-source contributor, Li implemented Word Sense Disambiguation algorithms in popular repositories like NLTK and maintains the pywsd Python library, reflecting a long-standing focus on lexical semantics. His background in computational linguistics and corpus linguistics informs practical solutions—like a novel "Gacha" filter for cleaning parallel corpora—and he often bridges human-in-the-loop and stochastic methods to improve downstream IR and translation quality. Based in Singapore, he pairs academic rigor from NTU and Saarland with industrial impact, frequently translating linguistic insight into scalable ML systems.
12 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Lisbon Machine Learning School (LxMLS)Master Exchange Student Computational Linguistics, Master Exchange Student Computational Linguistics at Universität des SaarlandesMaster of Arts (M.A.) Computational Linguistics, Master of Arts (M.A.) Computational Linguistics at Nanyang Technological University Singapore
English, Chinese, hokkien (min), Vietnamese, French, Thai, c, c++, java, perl, python, apache, mysql, php, latex, bibtex, django, javascript, nosql
Stackoverflow
118,444reputation
24.0mreached
1,121answers
773questions
lucene
top-5%
unix
top-5%
pytorch
top-1%
tree
top-1%
semantics
top-5%
regex
top-1%
Github Skills (51)
algorithm10
algorithms10
pytorch10
machine-translation10
python10
nltk10
machine-learning10
regex10
implement10
tree10
wordnet10
parsing10
natural-language-processing10
nlp10
scripting9
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
alvations/pywsd
Jan 2014 - Jul 2022
Python Implementations of Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) Technologies.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:262 commits, 16 PRs, 130 pushes in 8 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Li primarily contributed to the development of a Python-based word sense disambiguation (WSD) library, focusing on implementing and integrating various Lesk-based algorithms. Their work included creating the core logic for the Lesk algorithm, adding test cases, refactoring the existing codebase, and incorporating several variations, including adapted and cosine versions. Further, they added functionality for WSD baseline algorithms, specifically the original lesk algorithm, indicating a focus on algorithm implementation within the context of NLP.
nlpimplementationssense-disambiguation-wsdpythontechnologies
nltk/nltk
Apr 2014 - Sep 2020
NLTK Source
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 reviews, 804 commits, 196 PRs in 6 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Li primarily worked on the implementation and modification of algorithms related to Natural Language Processing (NLP) within the NLTK project. Their contributions include the addition of the Lesk algorithm for Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) and the growth, diagnosis, and final and algorithms for word alignment symmetrization. The user made changes to existing code to align with guidelines and improve functionality.
nlppythonmachine-learningnltknatural-language-processing
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