Doing a research in Natural Language Processing from a statistics department....

[h56cho]

Hello,

My situation is a little strange because I am a Statistics student but I ended up doing research in Natural Language Processing (NLP)/ AI/ Deep Learning due to my supervisor's recommendation.

I feel strange because although I can read the NLP paper, understand them, and come up with my own research topics (so far I have identified 3 different research topics), I am not a part of computer science department NLP lab. My supervisor into applying/developing machine learning algorithms for analyzing open-ended survey questions, so I guess his work is somewhat related to NLP, but he is not really an expert in NLP/Deep Learning. He does not have much knowledge in the field and sometimes I feel like I am taking on this initative all by myself. I am wondering,

- Is it advisable for me to seek a professor from computer science NLP lab to be my co-supervisor?

- What are the advantages of doing a NLP research in a big computer science NLP lab?

- Is collaboration important for a PhD student to do research in NLP? I see many PhD students who publishes at top NLP conferences are often co-authored with multiple number of collarborators. I am just doing NLP research with my supervisor, and my supervisor and I don't really have any connection with NLP researchers. Should I make an effort to find NLP researchers whom I can work with for my research (of course, I will be doing most of the work since I want to be the first author)?

- If I need to seek collaborator / co-supervisor who are familiar with the field of NLP, how should I approach them? can I try sending them emails and see if they are interested in my research? I guess the best way is to talk to people at a conference but due to COVID-19, everything is taking place online and I doubt whether I will be able to make any connections.

- Do PhD student from a big NLP lab have better computational resource than the PhD students who does NLP research outside of those labs? My supervisor recently set up an account for the national supercomputer (I am in Canada, it's called SHARCNET) so that I may take an advantage of it, but since almost every researchers in Canada have access to this resource, when I submit the job on SLURM the queue wait time can be long. Are PhD students from computer science NLP lab often free of this problem? (do they have a better access to computational resource?)

...Lots of questions! Could someone advise me on these issues?

 

Thank you so much for your time,

Edited November 27, 2020 by h56cho