News and Kudos

PolyU-trained students win the first-ever award for Hong Kong in the International Linguistics Olympiad 2021

Trained by the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies (CBS) and the Department of English (ENGL), the student representatives have won the first-ever award for Hong Kong in the 18th International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL). All the four students have earned medals (1 Gold, 2 Silvers and 1 Bronze) with their impeccable performance in solving the world's toughest linguistic puzzles. Among 56 teams consisting of 216 talented young linguists, the record-breaking Hong Kong team has obtained the highest average score for the individual competition and been inducted into the Hall of Fame as one of the Dream Teams in which all team members earned a medal. Congratulations!   Result of IOL2021: https://ioling.org/results/2021/ Hall of Fame: https://ioling.org/results/hall_of_fame/

Officials of Food and Health Bureau visit CBS

Three government officials from the Food and Health Bureau, namely Deputy Secretary Shirley Kwan, Principal Assistant Secretary Chris Fung and Assistant Secretary Ricky Wu, visited CBS on 7 July and met with our Head of Department David C.S. Li, Associate Head Roxana Fung and the teaching team of Master of Speech Therapy (MST) programme. During the meeting and the guided tour of the Speech Therapy Unit (STU), the officials received a briefing on STU’s services and the professional training that we provide to aspiring speech therapists. The two parties exchanged ideas on nurturing professional speech therapists, and discussed the speech therapist manpower planning in Hong Kong and relevant policy initiatives. The officials also visited our Speech and Language Sciences Laboratories and learned more about the department’s initiatives in the teaching and research in speech therapy and language sciences.

CBS Associate Professor wins the RGC Research Fellowship 2021/22

Congratulations to our Associate Professor Dr. PENG Gang for being awarded the prestigious RGC Research Fellowship (RFS) 2021/22! Competing with more than 30 nominations with his excellent research proposal, Dr. Peng is the only PolyU awardee among the 10 RFS awardees, winning a grant of around HK$5.16 million. RFS is a fellowship grant funded by the Research Grants Council (RGC), aiming to recognize exceptionally outstanding academics teaching in universities and provide them with sustained support to their research and development.

CBS undergraduate student wins the President Emeritus Professor Poon Chung-kwong Scholarship 2020/21

Mr PAN Tung-le, a Year-3 student of BA (Hons) in Chinese and Bilingual Studies (BACBS), was awarded the President Emeritus Professor Poon Chung-kwong Scholarship.   Since joining PolyU, Mr Pan has demonstrated his dedication to linguistics studies and strong leadership quality through his active involvement in linguistics-related activities. For instance, he has been playing a key role in the organization and training activities of the Hong Kong Linguistics Olympiad, while he is also a student helper for CBS’ Chair Professor Huang Chu-ren’s linguistics research projects. During his summer internship, he developed the application of linguistics to language technology as a project leader in an AI-based language learning company in Taiwan. In addition to his outstanding academic performance, Mr Pan is evidently an active member of the PolyU student community by devoting his time to various extracurricular activities and community services. We are very proud of Mr Pan’s accomplishment!

PolyU-trained students win 8 medals in the 3rd Asia Pacific Linguistics Olympiad

The Hong Kong Linguistics Olympiad (HKLO) team, under the training by the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies (CBS) and the Department of English (ENGL), has proudly won 8 medals (1 Gold, 2 Silvers and 5 Bronzes) among 182 contestants from 6 countries or regions in the 3rd Asia Pacific Linguistics Olympiad (APLO2021) on 28 Mar 2021. Kudos to our talented HKLO team! https://aplo.asia/results/aplo-2021-results/

Linguistic Training and Internship Programme for Gifted Students in Secondary Schools

To further unleash the potential of gifted students, the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies and the Department of English at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University offer the Linguistic Training and Internship Programme to secondary school students. Funded by the Gifted Education Fund of Education Bureau, this programme is the first workshop in Hong Kong which provides linguistic training and internship opportunities for gifted students at secondary levels. Schools, parents and guardians are cordially invited to nominate Secondary 2 to Secondary 5 students to apply for this programme. This 13-month programme aims at equipping students with knowledge in the areas of language sciences and developing their analytics skills and research methods. It provides precious internship opportunities for students to gain hands-on experience in conducting research projects under mentorship, as well as improve their interpersonal and teamwork skills through their engagement with peers and mentors in an interdisciplinary and multi-cultural environment. This programme is free of charge and 20 students will be selected to participate in this programme since May 2021. For those who would like to nominate students to apply for this programme, please send the completed application form by post on or before 15 April 2021 (Thursday) to the following address: CF701 Tang Ping Yuan Building The Hong Kong Polytechnic University 11 Yuk Choi Road, Hung Hom, Kowloon (Attn: Ms Tracy LUO Xin) The application form can be downloaded from the Education Bureau’s website. For more details about the programme, please refer to the programme outline and our website https://polyu.hk/KwLxD. Should you have any enquiries, please contact Ms Tracy LUO at 3400 3823 or via email at tracyxin.luo@polyu.edu.hk.

CBS Postgraduate Scholarships 2021/22

In order to recruit high-calibre students who are determined to pursue academic research, the MA Scheme in Chinese, Linguistics and Translation is launching two scholarships in the 2021/22 academic year. CBS Postgraduate Scholarship is an entry scholarship, which offers a 50% tuition waiver to applicants with outstanding intellectual potential to complete an MA thesis and have achieved excellent academic results in the qualifications already obtained. CBS Distinguished Postgraduate Scholarship is a graduation scholarship, which worth 50% of the tuition fee for graduates who have completed their MA thesis and graduated with excellent academic achievements. Distinguished students may receive both scholarships, which will be awarded full tuition fee in total. No separate application is required for the scholarships. Applicants who have submitted their application by 31 March 2021 will be automatically considered for the Entry Scholarship through the admission interview process.

CBS undergraduate student wins the Outstanding Student Award of Faculty of Humanities 2020

Ms CHAN Cheuk Sze, a student of BA (Hons) in Language and Speech Sciences (BALSS), was awarded the Outstanding Student Award of Faculty of Humanities 2020 in recognition of her excellent all-round performance. Aside from excelling in her academic achievement, Ms Chan has also been active outside the classroom including practising her knowledge and skills through WIE (Work-Integrated Education) in our Speech Therapy Unit, service learning in promoting child and adolescent development in Hangzhou and Summer Language Exchange Programme in Korea. Her experiences of putting knowledge into practice have demonstrated how students could utilize what they have learned to broaden their horizons and convert their knowledge and skills into positive impacts on the communities. All this made her a perfect role model for our students. Congratulations!

PolyU team wins the Best Paper Award at top computational linguistics conference

Why do we all know that the word “finished” in the sentence “The editor finished the article” means ‘reading’ instead of its literal meaning? Prof Huang Chu-ren and Dr Emmanuele Chersoni of the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies (CBS) at PolyU study logical metonymy interpretation, which explains the processing behind sentence comprehension such as this one. Recently, their collaborative paper with Aix-Marseille University and The University of Pisa has been selected as the Best Paper of AACL-IJCNLP 2020*, one of the top conferences in computational linguistics, for its research excellence. Congratulations! Giulia Rambelli, Emmanuele Chersoni, Alessandro Lenci, Philippe Blache and Chu-Ren Huang. 2020. Comparing Probabilistic, Distributional and Transformer-Based Models on Logical Metonymy Interpretation. AACL-IJCNLP 2020* Best Paper. *AACL-IJCNLP 2020 is the abbreviation of “The 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing”.

PolyU-trained students win the Gold and Bronze medals in the 2nd Asia Pacific Linguistics Olympiad

Jointly trained by the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies (CBS) and the Department of English (ENGL), the Hong Kong Linguistics Olympiad (HKLO) team won 1 Gold, 1 Bronze and 6 Honorable Mentions in the Second Asia Pacific Linguistics Olympiad (APLO 2020). APLO 2020 was held simultaneously in 7 cities on 27 September 2020, including Shanghai, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Seoul, Taipei and Hong Kong. Congratulations to HKLO team! https://aplo.asia/