Research Interest/Output of New Academic Staff

FH Newsletter 2021 Issue 1

Research Interest/Output of New Academic Staff

Research & Scholarly Activities

Dr Emmanuele CHERSONI

Research Assistant Professor
Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies

Dr Emmanuele Chersoni obtained a joint PhD degree in Language Sciences from Aix-Marseille University (France) and the University of Pisa (Italy). His research is at the intersection between theoretical linguistics, cognitive science and machine learning. His works have been mainly focusing on the meaning aspects of natural language sentences that make them more or less difficult for human language understanding. He is also interested in the applications of natural language processing to specialized domains, such as the biomedical and the financial one.

He has published several papers in the top-level conferences of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL, EMNLP, EACL) and in journals such as Natural Language Engineering and Computational Linguistics. His publications have been recently awarded with international prizes, including the Baidu AACL-IJCNLP Best Paper Award 2020 and the IBM Best Short Paper Award at the AAAI Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Health. Since 2019, he is also one of the organizers of the yearly workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics.

Dr Nate Ming CURRAN

Assistant Professor
Department of English and Communication

Dr Nate Ming Curran earned his PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. His research interests include intercultural communication, new media, and the gig economy. He currently has several ongoing projects related to language teaching in the gig economy and has in the past collaborated with one of the world’s largest online platforms for language teaching. His research is highly interdisciplinary and he uses both qualitative and quantitative methods, including interviews, surveys, and experiments. He has also published on various topics related to contemporary Korean society and has received funding from both the Korea Foundation and the Academy of Korean Studies. At PolyU, he is a member of the Research Centre for Professional Communication in English (RCPCE) and actively seeks to collaborate with both faculty and students. Since joining ENGL in January 2021, he has published articles in Information, Communication & Society and Journal of Consumer Culture.

Dr Jamie MCKEOWN

Research Assistant Professor
Department of English and Communication

Dr Jamie McKeown holds a degree in Law from the University of Cambridge and a PhD from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Before embarking on a doctoral thesis, Jamie worked in the creative industries (advertising and television). Before his recent return to the PolyU community, he spent ten months working for one of the U.K’s leading Diversity and Inclusion consultancies. His current research interests include legal discourse and media discourse (especially the interplay of the two), disinformation, and certain socio-interactional aspects of professional communication. He has published in several leading journals and was honored with an Editors’ Choice award 2020 for work on rising incivility in television news. Above all else, Jamie strives to achieve authenticity and originality in his work and values quality over quantity in terms of output.

Dr Mohammad MOMENIAN

Research Assistant Professor
Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies

Dr Mohammad Momenian got his PhD degree from Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran where he worked on neurolinguistics and multilingualism using fMRI. He worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the Laboratory for Communication Science, University of Hong Kong, before joining the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies at PolyU. Mohammad does research on how multilingual speakers’ brains process and represent languages. He has shown in his research what linguistic and individual variables make multilingual brains similar/different to monolingual brains. Mohammad’s recent research interest is how healthy aging would influence language comprehension in multilingual speakers in Hong Kong. Hong Kong has a growing aging population. It is, therefore, very important to know how older adults process their language(s) in the brain and what variables help protect their language skills against effects of healthy aging.

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