Rate My Professor Lay Ki

Associate Professor Lay-Ki Soon is based in the School of Information Technology at Monash University Malaysia, where she has served as Associate Head (Graduate Research) since November 2018. She holds a PhD in Engineering (Web Engineering) from Soongsil University, Korea, with the thesis 'Towards a Semantically-Driven Focused Web Crawling'; a Master of Science in Database from Universiti Putra Malaysia; and a Bachelor of Computer Science from Universiti Putra Malaysia. Before Monash, she was Senior Lecturer and Deputy Dean (Research and Innovation) at the Faculty of Computing and Informatics, Multimedia University from March 2016 to August 2018, and Research Fellow at Telekom Malaysia R&D, contributing to call data records database optimization. She has graduated seven PhD students and three Master's students, one of whom received the MMU Best Master Thesis Award in 2015. Lay-Ki Soon teaches Databases and Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing to Master's and undergraduate students, and has delivered professional courses on Relational Database and NoSQL Database.

Her research focuses on applied natural language processing and data management, encompassing analysis of domain-specific data and social media user-generated content, aspect-based sentiment analysis, cyberbullying detection, relation extraction from conversational texts, misinformation on social media, knowledge graph generation for customer support, and digital health projects like emotion-aware mental health intervention chatbots and emotion detection from video data. She has led FRGS-funded projects in 2014, 2017, and 2022 on sentiment analysis, cyberbullying, and relation extraction, respectively, and collaborated with Telekom Malaysia and Intel on industry initiatives. Awards include the ITEX'24 Silver Award for 'MOBOT' Mobile Application of a conversational Agent for Mental Health (2024), Silver Medal at Malaysia Technology Expo 2023 for 'MoBOT, A Self-Help Digital Mental Health Intervention Conversational Agent' (2023), and the Incubator Grant Bolster Category (2023). Key publications are 'Automating IRAC analysis in Malaysian contract law using a semi-structured knowledge base' (2025, Artificial Intelligence and Law), 'Domain-Independent True Fact Identification from Knowledge Graph' (2025, International Journal on Informatics Visualization), 'Iterative Window Mean Filter: Thwarting Diffusion-Based Adversarial Purification' (2025, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing), 'Expanding Malaysian English Dataset with Human-in-the-Loop Annotation for Entity and Relation Recognition' (2025, IALP), and 'Bridging the Gap: Transfer Learning from English PLMs to Malaysian English' (2024, ACL Workshop).