PhD Candidate · Final Year

Dong Viet Hoang

Hoang V. Dong · Researcher in recommender systems and LLMs. Builder of small, useful things.

I'm a final-year PhD candidate in Computer Science at SMU School of Computing and Information Systems, advised by Assoc. Prof. Yuan Fang and Assoc. Prof. Hady W. Lauw. My research looks at how we can make recommendation and retrieval systems more faithful, fair, and aware of user intent — most recently through contrastive and LLM-assisted methods. Outside the lab I run two ventures: Mavenpath, a live e-learning platform, and Hai Trinh Tau Thuyen, an offline-first system for digitising Vietnam's fishing logbooks.

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Research Interests

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I study how recommender systems can become more honest about what users actually want, and how modern language models can help (or quietly hurt) that goal.

Recommender Systems Large Language Models Machine Learning Data Mining Contrastive Learning Fairness Information Retrieval

Selected Publications

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  • WSDM 2025New
    A Contrastive Framework with User, Item and Review Alignment for Recommendation
    Hoang V. Dong, Yuan Fang, Hady W. Lauw
    PaperCodeBibTeX
  • KES 2024
    Collaborative Fair-is-Better Filtering for Implicit Feedback
    Hoang V. Dong, Huu-Quang Nguyen, Hoang D. Nguyen, Duc-Trong Le
    PaperBibTeX

Selected Projects

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Research · Recommendation

Contrastive Alignment for Review-aware Recs

A contrastive framework that aligns user, item and review representations so that review text actively sharpens recommendation, instead of sitting as decoration.

PyTorchContrastiveLLM
Industry · NLP

User-Intent Identification for E-commerce Search

Models real user queries on Sendo.vn to detect search intent and re-rank results. Bi-LSTM + CRF with FastText embeddings.

Bi-LSTMCRFFastText
Venture · EdTech

Mavenpath — Live E-learning Platform

Founder. A platform for high-quality live lectures in Vietnam, with real-time interaction, recording and course management.

ProductVietnam
Venture · Maritime

Hai Trinh Tau Thuyen — Offline Vessel Logs

Founder. A monitoring & digital-logbook system for fishing vessels that keeps working when there is no internet at sea, then syncs on return.

Offline-firstIoTGIS

Volunteer & Community

Things I do outside research and work — the people, groups, and conferences I've had the privilege to help.

President · 2026

Dong Hanh Foundation — Singapore Chapter

Dong Hanh is a non-profit supporting youth from underprivileged backgrounds in Vietnam. Joined the Singapore chapter in 2022 and became President of Dong Hanh Singapore in 2026.

Vice-President · 2025/26

SMU Business Intelligence & Analytics Club (SMU BIA)

Vice-President of SMU BIA for the 2025/26 batch — running events, mentoring, and bridging analytics practice with the student community.

Volunteer · 2025

DASFAA 2025 — Singapore

On-site volunteer at the 30th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications, hosted in Singapore.

News

  • 2026 · AprIn the final stretch of my PhD — writing up the thesis and preparing for defence.
  • 2026Started as President of Dong Hanh Singapore.
  • 2025Honoured to receive the Vietnam Digital Award 2025.
  • 2025Received the SIGIR Travel Award to attend WSDM 2025.
  • 2025Paper accepted at WSDM 2025: contrastive alignment of users, items and reviews.
  • 2024Paper accepted at KES 2024: fair-is-better collaborative filtering.
  • 2022Began PhD at SMU, advised by Yuan Fang and Hady W. Lauw.