Prof. Rau's expertise is Austronesian linguistics. She is the first linguist in Taiwan who received an Endangered Language Documentation Project (ELDP) grant from the University of London to digitally document the Yami (Tao) language, the only Philippine language in Taiwan, among the 16 Taiwanese Austronesian languages.  Her current research is on developing a Yami (Tao) bidirectional translation system and TAOGPT in collaboration with the Tsinghua University Innovation Engineering Laboratory team to produce a system with high accuracy and strong applicability as an indispensable AI tool for the revival and transmission of the Yami language. 

As an Austronesian applied linguist, Prof. Rau also produced textbooks and MOOC videos for teaching and learning Indonesian and Filipino languages and cultures.

Prof. Rau's research team consists of Yami language experts, linguists, and computer scientists, training undergraduate and graduate students to conduct research using natural language processing technology to analyze Yami language corpus and train the Transformer model to develop a Yami-Chinese two-way translation system, which will serve as an indispensable tool for Yami language learning. It also uses the expert knowledge provided by Yami grammar books and research papers to produce useful question and answer pairs, providing a good helper for Yami grammar Q&A, most needed by Yami teachers to effectively understand the Austronesian focus system and case markers.

On the aspect of teaching and learning Austronesian languages, Prof. Rau is currently leading two teaching teams in Indonesian and Filipino languages for the General Education Center at CCU.