In this talk, we will share our goals and experience in developing the Cantonese Wordnet Project, a human-curated lexical database of Cantonese which is being gradually enriched with layers of information useful for both linguistic research and education.. In doing so, we will start by broadly discussing some key aspects of digital lexicology, such as data formats/curation/sharing in view of sustainability, corpus-based lexicography, and some potential applications of wordnets in education. Our discussion will draw comparisons to other wordnet projects (e.g., for Kristang, Coptic and Abui) in how to determine the best way to align digital lexicography projects with the needs and wishes of language communities and with the state of a language’s path towards digitization. Towards the end of our talk, we will also open a discussion on possible ways of more effective data collection of Cantonese involving wider communities (e.g., collaborative platforms, crowdsourcing).

 

Speaker 講者
Prof. Luis Morgado da COSTA (Palacký University Olomouc)
Luis Morgado da Costa is an interdisciplinary researcher with a strong background in computational linguistics. He is currently the holder of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action, hosted at Palacký University Olomouc in the Czech Republic. His current project is working towards improving the tasks of Parsing and Grammatical Error Detection for Mandarin Chinese using computational grammars. He is especially interested in building language resources (corpora, wordnets, treebanks, etc.), and in exploiting them in the field of education. He works mainly with English and Mandarin Chinese, but also works collaboratively with other languages such as Cantonese, Japanese, Portuguese, Kristang, Coptic, Indonesian and Abui.
Prof. Joanna UT-SEONG SIO (Palacký University Olomouc)
Joanna Ut-Seong Sio is an associate professor of Chinese linguistics at Palacký University Olomouc, the Czech Republic. She was educated in Macau, Hong Kong, Canada and the Netherlands. She received her PhD in Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her research interests include Chinese languages (Mandarin, Cantonese, Min), especially in the areas of syntax, semantics, digital lexicology, as well as the use of verbal arts in the training of communication skills.

Scotland has two autochthonous vernaculars: Gaelic and Scots. Gaelic, a Q-Celtic language, had, according to the 2011 census, somewhat fewer than 60,000 speakers (with a further five thousand people with native or near-native competence in the language) out of 5.2 million inhabitants. Scots, a West Germanic language which, like English, is a descendant of Old English, had, according to the same census, around 1.5 million native speakers. Practically all speakers of either language have native speaker competence in Scottish Standard English, the ancestor of which began to infiltrate Scotland from the seventeenth century on. During the period following, however, it began to assume features not found in its equivalent in England, many of which derive from Scots. 

This presentation will discuss how a specifically Scottish variety of Standard English came into being in the second half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As a corollary, the ‘decline’ of Scots as national (or even native) language during this period will be analysed.

Speaker

Professor Robert McColl Millar, University of Aberdeen
Robert McColl Millar is Professor in Linguistics and Scottish Language at the University of Aberdeen. He has published widely on issues concerned with Scottish language, linguistic contact and the sociology of language. His most recent books include Modern Scots (2018) and A Sociolinguistic History of Scotland (2020). A History of the Scots Language will be published next year. Before arriving in Aberdeen in 1996, he held academic posts in Canada, Finland, Austria and Norway.

Forensic voice comparison (FVC) typically involves the comparison of voices on two sets of recordings: an unknown voice of an offender and a known voice of a suspect. A key goal in FVC research is to empirically evaluate the evidential value of speech features under forensic conditions. Voice quality (VQ) is one of the most useful and popular features in FVC casework, and is typically analysed in terms of categorical auditory-based labels. However, empirical validation on the usefulness of VQ features are surprisingly limited, not to mention the acoustic aspects of VQ. In this talk, I will report a study that empirically tested the evidential strength of long-term voice quality acoustics. 75 male speakers aged 18-45 were selected from a forensically-oriented database of Australian English speakers. The evidential strength of a number of spectral tilt, additive noise parameters, and combinations thereof were assessed under the Bayesian likelihood-ratio framework. Results show that system performance was mostly stable across 100 replications. Individual VQ parameters yielded poor speaker-discriminatory performance, but in general performance improved when more parameters were used. Speech style mismatch had clearer detrimental effects on system validity than non-contemporaneous recordings. Implications for FVC will be discussed.

Speaker
Dr. Ricky CHAN (The University of Hong Kong)
Dr. Ricky Chan obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge. He is currently Assistant Professor at School of English, the University of Hong Kong and the principal investigator of the Speech, Language and Cognition Laboratory. His research spans experimental phonetics, forensic speech science, psycholinguistics, and implicit learning. He recently completed an ECS project on assessing the evidential value of voice quality acoustics, and will embark on a new research project on forensic voice comparison in China.

16 departments and units of Faculty of Arts participated in this event. Exhibitions and admission talks were held in Esther Lee Building, Chung Chi College. Faculty leaflets and other publicity materials were distributed at the two Faculty booths in the Esther Lee Building and the University Mall for introducing the programmes of the Faculty. Visitors found the Information Day useful in understanding the admission requirements and enjoyed having conversations with our students and teachers. The Faculty of Arts is looking forward to meeting visitors next year.

In this talk, we will share our goals and experience in developing the Cantonese Wordnet Project, a human-curated lexical database of Cantonese which is being gradually enriched with layers of information useful for both linguistic research and education.. In doing so, we will start by broadly discussing some key aspects of digital lexicology, such as data formats/curation/sharing in view of sustainability, corpus-based lexicography, and some potential applications of wordnets in education. Our discussion will draw comparisons to other wordnet projects (e.g., for Kristang, Coptic and Abui) in how to determine the best way to align digital lexicography projects with the needs and wishes of language communities and with the state of a language’s path towards digitization. Towards the end of our talk, we will also open a discussion on possible ways of more effective data collection of Cantonese involving wider communities (e.g., collaborative platforms, crowdsourcing).

Speakers:
Prof. Luis Morgado da COSTA
Luis Morgado da Costa is an interdisciplinary researcher with a strong background in computational linguistics. He is currently the holder of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action, hosted at Palacký University Olomouc in the Czech Republic. His current project is working towards improving the tasks of Parsing and Grammatical Error Detection for Mandarin Chinese using computational grammars. He is especially interested in building language resources (corpora, wordnets, treebanks, etc.), and in exploiting them in the field of education. He works mainly with English and Mandarin Chinese, but also works collaboratively with other languages such as Cantonese, Japanese, Portuguese, Kristang, Coptic, Indonesian and Abui.
Prof. Joanna Ut-Seong SIO
Joanna Ut-Seong Sio is an associate professor of Chinese linguistics at Palacký University Olomouc, the Czech Republic. She was educated in Macau, Hong Kong, Canada and the Netherlands. She received her PhD in Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her research interests include Chinese languages (Mandarin, Cantonese, Min), especially in the areas of syntax, semantics, digital lexicology, as well as the use of verbal arts in the training of communication skills.

 

Chiefly drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the district of Keqiao in Zhejiang Province since 2009, this talk will show that irregular financial transactions play a significant role in the sustenance of otherwise tenuous business relations between Indian traders and Chinese suppliers in the China–Dubai fabric trade. Much of the fabric exported from Keqiao to Dubai relies on intertwined formal and informal transactions operated by Indian diasporic trading networks. These labyrinthine transnational money transactions aim to circumvent institutional hurdles and overcome deficiencies in operating capital, yet inherent to this system is a cycle of payment lags that cause tense relations between payers and payees. Such money transactions facilitate eventual payment in most cases most of the time and maintain enough trust to keep the trade network alive. Furthermore, the interlocking circuits of money circulations also prevent the overaccumulation of wealth and power by any particular stakeholder involved in the international trade and defy or at least circumvent the formal political authority of state and financial institutions that seek to curtail such practices. These transactions thereby create a larger space for business survival among the grassroots players, especially Indian traders who may not have enough capital available when they initiate a deal with a Chinese supplier.

Speaker

Dr. Ka-Kin Cheuk
Dr. Ka-Kin Cheuk is Assistant Professor in Anthropology in the Department of Chinese and History at the City University of Hong Kong. He previously held teaching and research positions at Universiteit Leiden, NYU Shanghai, and Rice University. His research revolves around the study of migration, transnationalism, and inter-Asian connections, with ethnographic focuses on China, Hong Kong, India, and the Middle East. His recent publications include “Diasporic Convergence, Sustained Transience and Indifferent Survival: Indian Traders in China” (History and Anthropology 33:2, 2022), “Teaching Ethnographic Research Methods in the Time of COVID-19: Virtual Fieldtrips, a Web Symposium, and Public Engagement with Asian American Communities in Houston, Texas” (Teaching and Learning Anthropology 4:1, 2021), and “Making Mumbai (in China)” (in Lisa Björkman, ed., Bombay Brokers, Duke University Press, 2021). In recent years, he has received several teaching grants, including a Course Development Grant from Rice University, for developing new, alternative, and decolonizing teaching methods in Asian studies, Chinese studies, and anthropology. Having conducted fieldwork over the past 17 years on the Sikh diaspora in Hong Kong and on Indian traders in southeast China, he is currently developing a new project on the transnational flower industry and environmental ethics in China and Scotland.

Keynote Speakers:
Dermot Moran, Boston College, USA 
Jc Beall, University of Notre Dame, USA 
Elizabeth Brient, The University of Georgia, USA

Other Participants:
• Eric Perl, Loyola Marymount University, USA 
• Marie-Anne Vannier, Université de Lorraine, France 
• Douglas Hedley, University of Cambridge, England‎
• Gregory Moss, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
• Ryan Haecker, University of Cambridge, England
• Paula Pico Estrada, Universidad del Salvador, Argentina
• Bret Davis, Loyola University, USA 
• Sean Hannan, MacEwan University, Canada 
• Ian Alexander Moore, Loyola Marymount University, USA

All are welcome.
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkIjtv5MRWV5wHlFXpDy-AA/featured

This lecture will discuss transnational research collaboration on the interconnected histories of the Arabian Peninsula, the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean Rim. Professor Barakat and Professor Wrisley argue that a multilingual, multi-archive approach is necessary to construct a future of historical inquiry for the region and that it is the digital which allows researchers to bring those histories into explicit dialogue. The talk will also feature examples of handwritten text recognition (HTR), mapping and textual analysis.

Speakers: 
Prof. Nora Barakat, Dept. of History, Stanford University
Prof. Barakat is a historian of the late Ottoman Empire and the Modern Middle East. Her research focuses on people, commodities and landscapes in the interior regions between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
 
Prof. David Wrisley, Dept. of Digital Humanities, NYU Abu Dhabi 
Prof. Wrisley is a comparative medievalist and digital humanist. His research straddles the domains of late medieval court culture, Mediterranean studies, multilingual corpora analysis and the spatial humanities. He founded and organized the first digital humanities training institute in the Middle East in Beirut in 2015.

For details, please refer to the poster (Chinese version only).

由香港中文大學-北京語言大學漢語語言學與應用語言學聯合研究中心主辦的「2022漢學講座（一）：我看美國漢學」將於10月28日舉行，詳情如下：

主講嘉賓：徐志嘯教授（復旦大學）
統籌及主持人：張健教授（香港中文大學）、馮勝利教授（北京語言大學）

會議ID：920 1892 1580
會議密碼：375562

亦可通過以下鏈接進入講座：
https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/92018921580?pwd=dHBIVVJ1ejYyNmJ1K1B1cjVRTmc2QT09

n this academic year, we will have seven scholars and postgraduates to share with us their recent research, with an aim to facilitate academic exchange between teachers and students of art history and other disciplines. 

Speaker: Dr. LI, Yiwen, Assistant Professor, Department of Chinese and History, City University of Hong Kong

ZOOM meeting ID: 913 2308 0481 (Passcode: 904206)