Rayyan Merchant is an exchange student at RWTH Aachen from the University of Florida, where he has been working on SLaM laboratory projects with Prof. Dr. Tang for several years. He is currently pursuing Bachelor’s Degrees in Computer Science and Linguistics.

Rayyan’s first project, alongside Nancy Chen (University of Florida), revolves around creating a corpus of dialectal Spanish-language data from online sources. In 2021, he was also admitted to the University Scholars Program at the University of Florida, to work with Prof. Dr. Tang on machine-transliteration between Iranian/Afghan Persian and Tajik Persian.

Rayyan’s research interests center around creating tools and resources for low-resource languages, as well as language documentation.