Tin Ka Ping Education Fund Visiting Scholar Professor Gao Zhao Ming from National Taiwan University

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Professor Gao Zhao-Ming from National Taiwan University was invited to visit the Department of Linguistics and Modern Language Studies (LML) and the Centre for Research in Linguistics and Language Studies (CRLLS) from 12 January 2020 to 18 January 2020. As a recipient of the Tin Ka Ping Education Fund, he visited the foundation, exchanged thoughts with the academic staff on language technology and digital humanities, held consultation sessions for staff and postgraduate students and conducted a seminar and workshop organised by LML and CRLLS. Professor Gao is affiliated to the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Taiwan University. He has a keen interest in developing corpus-based computational tools and has published extensively on corpus linguistics, computer-assisted translation and intelligent computer-assisted language learning. 

The seminar titled “Corpus stylistics and Chinese literary discourses: A comparative study of four novels by Shen Congwen (沈從文) and Chang Eileen (張愛玲)" organised on 14 January 2020 attracted both academic staff and students. In his talk, Professor Gao explored the stylistic differences of Shen Congwen and Chang Eileen at morphological, lexical, syntactic and semantic levels based on four literary works. He presented systematic methods to identify stylistic features and patterns that characterise a Chinese literary work by employing Chinese word segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, keyword identification, syntactic patterns identification and regular expressions. 

The workshop titled “Corpus Processing, Analyses, and Applications” offered staff and students hands-on experience in using some useful corpus processing tools to analyse some sample Chinese texts. 

In conclusion, Professor Gao has a strong academic track record in the field of applied linguistics and is a leading pioneer in this field. His visit to LML and CRLLS has led to further and better academic linkages between the two units. Furthermore, his insights have benefited colleagues directly in course development, programme development and research development in the field of applied linguistics and digital humanities.

Staff and students learned how corpus tools could facilitate the analysis of literary works in the seminar.

Staff and students got hands-on experience using corpus tools in the workshop.