Caren Han

Dr. Caren Han serves as Adjunct Senior Lecturer in Computer Science and Software Engineering within the School of Physics, Mathematics and Computing at The University of Western Australia, and is affiliated with the UWA Data Institute. Her research focuses on natural language processing with deep learning, visual-linguistic multi-modal learning, abusive language detection, document layout analysis, and recommender systems. She earned her Ph.D. in 2017 and subsequently joined the University of Sydney for six years, where she established the USYDNLP group in 2019 alongside Dr. Josiah Poon. She currently co-leads the Australia Deep Learning NLP Group (AD-NLP). Han holds honorary or adjunct senior lecturer positions at the University of Sydney, University of Edinburgh, and POSTECH.

Han has received the School of Physics, Mathematics and Computing Early-Career Research Award in 2023 from The University of Western Australia, along with the Google Research Award in 2024, Dean’s Outstanding Teaching Award from 2018 to 2021 at the University of Sydney, Supervisor of the Year in 2021 at the University of Sydney, Best Area Paper Award at COLING 2022, and Best Paper Award at EMNLP 2020. Her key publications include "SynJAC: synthetic-data-driven joint-granular adaptation and calibration for domain specific scanned document key information extraction" (2026, Information Fusion), "ChuLo: Chunk-Level Key Information Representation for Long Document Understanding" (2025, Findings of ACL), "Graph-Based Multimodal Contrastive Learning for Chart Question Answering" (2025, SIGIR), "KIEPrompter: Leveraging Lightweight Models' Predictions for Cost-Effective Key Information Extraction using Vision LLMs" (2025, CIKM), and "MAGIC-VQA: Multimodal And Grounded Inference with Commonsense Knowledge for Visual Question Answering" (2025, Findings of ACL). With numerous publications in top conferences such as ACL, SIGIR, IJCAI, EMNLP, and AAAI, her work contributes significantly to advancements in multimodal learning and NLP applications. She is involved in projects like "ChatGEO: Forging Trust in Spatial Semantic Document Retrieval" at UWA.

Professional Email: caren.han@uwa.edu.au