Contagious Words/Epidemic Behaviours: Language Big Data Approaches to COVID-19

The workshop is intended to be an interdisciplinary forum for all concerned scholars with focus on how to use linguistic and textual data to understand both the development of the pandemic and the changes in human behaviours.

This workshop is hosted by Faculty of Humanities and Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. It is organized by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University – Peking University Research Centre on Chinese Linguistics (RP2U2) and co-organized by research groups in and outside of PolyU.

The presenters are researchers who have collaborated coming from a wide range of language big data related fields, such as digital humanities, corpus linguistics, cross-cultural communication, English for specific purposes, health communication, information retrieval, medical informatics, natural language processing, and translation. They will report both ongoing and completed research, with one published paper, two papers shortlisted for the IJCL COVID-19 special issues, and others under review for publication at different stages.

As the COVID-19 topic has both potential social impact and widely shared inter-disciplinary interests, this workshop aims to provide a forum where researchers in different areas working on related topics can share their latest progress and be enlightened by new insights.