His long-term research goal is to create intelligent systems that can achieve a human level of understanding of natural languages. Thien obtained his Ph.D. from New York University under Ralph Grishman and Kyunghyun Cho. His Ph.D. research centers around the development of Deep Learning models for Information Extraction, including Relation Extraction, Event Extraction, Mention Detection, and Slot Filling. In 2018, Thien completed his PostDoc with Yoshua Bengio at the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms where he developed multi-modal and multi-task learning systems to understand human languages. Thien was a recipient of the IBM Ph.D. fellowship in 2016.