Multimodal and multilingual NLP for social media
Tri An Le

Hi, I’m Tri An.

I'm an incoming CS Ph.D. student in the CGIM Lab at the University of Houston, where I will work with Dr. Zhigang Deng. My research focuses on multimodal and multilingual NLP for real-world online communication, especially social media content such as memes, GIFs, and short-form videos. I'm particularly interested in community-aware methods that capture implicit image-text cues and code-switching, and in using these models to study how meaning, framing, and engagement shift across communities in high-stakes settings such as misinformation, online harms, and mental health. I recently graduated summa cum laude from Wabash College with a double major in Computer Science and Mathematics.

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Multimodal NLP Multilingual, code-switched NLP Social media language Information retrieval Online harms Misinformation Mental health

Research Highlight

MemeMatch, Dual-Context Multimodal Meme Dataset and Retrieval

MemeMatch poster
Dual-context pipeline: local context (OCR overlay text + title) and global context (template semantics).

MemeMatch is a large-scale multimodal meme dataset and retrieval system for studying how meaning, intent, and emotion connect to online engagement and virality. It includes rich annotations such as emotion vectors, topics, and usage-intent labels, built through a dual-context pipeline:

  • Local context: OCR overlay text plus post title
  • Global context: template semantics and visual meaning

On top of this representation, MemeMatch supports intent-aware search (for example, “sarcastic memes about college”) and image-based retrieval, enabling analyses of how memes are reframed across communities and templates, and how those shifts relate to engagement.

➡️ See: Publications · CV

News

  • May 2026: Awarded the J. Crawford Polley Prize in Mathematics and Computer Science and George Lewes Mackintosh Memorial Fund!
    Mar 2026: MemeMatch got accepted at ICWSM 2026!
    Mar 2026: Awarded the Phi Beta Kappa Prize
    Jan 2026: Received the Robert Wedgeworth '59 Library Research, Scholarship, and Creativity Award
  • May 2025 - Aug 2025: Internships at Citywide Classroom and Re-Volt Innovations
    Jan 2025 - May 2025: Research abroad at AIT Budapest and HSDSLab
  • Jun 2024 - Aug 2024: Summer Undergraduate Math and Statistics Accelerator (SUMSA), IMSI, The University of Chicago.
  • Nov 2023: First Runner-up Michigan Autumn Take-home (MATH) Challenge.
    May 2023 - Aug 2023: Machine Learning Research Assistant, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Wabash College.