Faculty & Adjunct Professors (IST): Sarana Nutanong



Research Interests


  • Natural Language Processing for Low-Resource Languages 
  • Resources and Benchmarks 
  • Robust Learning Methods in Cross- and Multilingual Environments 
  • NLP in Regulated Domains: Legal and Financial Applications 


  • Contact


School of Information Science and Technology (IST),

Vidyasirimedhi Institute of Science and Technology (VISTEC), Wangchan Valley, Rayong, THAILAND

Tel: +66(0) 33 01 4307 | email: snutanon@vistec.ac.th




Education


Doctor of Philosophy, 2009.

Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, University of Melbourne


Master of Software Systems Engineering, 2004

Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, University of Melbourne


Bachelor of Computer Engineering (Honors), 2002

Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Melbourne




Work Experience


Research


  • Associate Professor, 2018 - present, School of Information Science and Technology, Vidyasirimedhi Institute of Science and Technology. 
  • Assistant Professor, 2014 - 2018, Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong. 
  • Assistant Research Scientist, 2012 - 2013, Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University and Department of Physiology, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. 
  • Postdoctoral Research Associate, 2010 - 2012, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland.

 



Teaching Interests


  • Database Systems
  • Data-Intensive Computing
  • Distributed Systems
  • Computer Networks
  • Functional Programming




Publications


Selected peer-reviewed publications (ACL, EMNLP, TACL).

2026
Wuttikorn Ponwitayarat, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Raymond Ng, Jann Railey Montalan, Thura Aung, Jian Gang Ngui, Yosephine Susanto, William Chandra Tjhi, Panuthep Tasawong, Erik Cambria, Ekapol Chuangsuwanich, Sarana Nutanong
SEA-BED: How Do Embedding Models Represent Southeast Asian Languages?
Proceedings of ACL 2026
2025
Pawitsapak Akarajaradwong, Pirat Pothavorn, Chompakorn Chaksangchaichot, Panuthep Tasawong, Thitiwat Nopparatbundit, Keerakiat Pratai, Sarana Nutanong
NitiBench: Benchmarking LLM Frameworks on Thai Legal Question Answering Capabilities
Proceedings of EMNLP 2025
Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Pume Tuchinda, Lalita Lowphansirikul, Surapon Nonesung, Panuthep Tasawong, Alham Fikri Aji, Can Udomcharoenchaikit, Sarana Nutanong
WangchanThaiInstruct: An Instruction-following Dataset for Culture-Aware, Multitask, and Multi-domain Evaluation in Thai
Proceedings of EMNLP 2025
2024
Jitkapat Sawatphol, Can Udomcharoenchaikit, Sarana Nutanong
Addressing Topic Leakage in Cross-Topic Evaluation for Authorship Verification
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, vol. 12
Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Wuttikorn Ponwitayarat, Lalita Lowphansirikul, Potsawee Manakul, Can Udomcharoenchaikit, Ekapol Chuangsuwanich, Sarana Nutanong
McCrolin: Multi-consistency Cross-lingual Training for Retrieval Question Answering
Findings of EMNLP 2024
Patomporn Payoungkhamdee, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Jinheon Baek, Potsawee Manakul, Can Udomcharoenchaikit, Ekapol Chuangsuwanich, Sarana Nutanong
An Empirical Study of Multilingual Reasoning Distillation for Question Answering
Proceedings of EMNLP 2024
2023
Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Wuttikorn Ponwitayarat, Lalita Lowphansirikul, Can Udomcharoenchaikit, Ekapol Chuangsuwanich, Sarana Nutanong
An Efficient Self-Supervised Cross-View Training for Sentence Embedding
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, vol. 11
Panuthep Tasawong, Wuttikorn Ponwitayarat, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Can Udomcharoenchaikit, Ekapol Chuangsuwanich, Sarana Nutanong
Typo-Robust Representation Learning for Dense Retrieval
Proceedings of ACL 2023


The complete record is on DBLP: https://dblp.org/pid/32/1518.html


Selected Projects

Thai Large Language Models
THB 31,831,940 (USD 950,000) · Ministry of Digital Economy and Society, Thailand
2025 – 2026
WangchanX: Foundation Models for Thai NLP
THB 40,000,000 (USD 1,190,000) · SCBX PCL, Thailand; PTT PLC, Thailand
2023 – 2025
Establishment of VISTEC-depa Thailand AI Research Institute
THB 50,000,000 (USD 1,490,000) · Digital Economy Promotion Agency, Thailand; VISTEC (matching fund)
2019 – 2023

USD amounts are approximate, converted at THB 33.5 per USD (October 2026).


Research Group Alumni


Patomporn Payoungkhamdee
Multilingual Reasoning
Ph.D. 2026
Bundit Boonyarit
Molecular Machine Learning for Drug Discovery
Ph.D. 2026
Kajjana Boonpalit
Machine Learning for Materials and Molecular Discovery
Ph.D. 2026
Lalita Lowphansirikul
Thai Language Modeling · now at PreceptorAI
M.Eng. 2026
Panuthep Tasawong
Robust Retrieval and Entity Disambiguation
Ph.D. 2025
Weerayut Buaphet
Thai Nested Named Entity Recognition
Ph.D. 2025
Norawit Urailertprasert
Visual Question Answering · now at PreceptorAI
M.Eng. 2025
Peerat Limkonchotiwat
Cross-lingual Representation Learning · now at AI Singapore
Ph.D. 2024
Krissanee Kamthawee
Mutual Information Maximization for Short Text Clustering
M.Eng. 2024
Jitkapat Sawatphol
Authorship Representation Learning · now at PreceptorAI
M.Eng. 2023

Last updated October 2026.