The Outstanding Research Award of the Pan Wen Yuan Foundation is given annually to distinguished Chinese individuals to recognize their excellent contributions in technology-related fields, such as electronics, information science, and communication. The number of awardees is limited to five Chinese from Taiwan, mainland China or other regions per year.

Dr. Hsu was awarded the prize for his outstanding research contributions in natural language processing and biological literature mining. The GOING intelligent input method developed by Dr. Hsu, which is widely used in Taiwan, has helped to popularize the use of the Chinese language computer input system in Taiwan. By combining the research experiences of computational theory and natural language processing, he was able to develop the most accurate protein secondary structure prediction algorithm. He also constructed the first automatic biological relation extraction system and is a world leader in biological literature mining research.