His education background includes a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Jilin University (China), a Master of Science from the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China, and a Ph.D. in information studies from the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP). While at UMCP, he did most of his research at the Laboratory for Computational Linguistics and Information Processing, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. He is on the adjunct faculty of the Interdepartmental Program in Linguistics at LSU.