City University has launched an $8 million research centre to spearhead novel applications of linguistics for use in fields such as translation and computing.
The Halliday Centre for Intelligent Applications of Language Studies is named after world-famous linguistician Professor Michael Halliday, who serves as its adviser.
The centre draws on the 'systemic functional linguistics' developed by Professor Halliday, which stresses that language is a resource for communication rather than a set of rules.
Acting director Dr Jonathan Webster said the approach provided 'the nucleus' for both the research and teaching activities of the centre.
It would be used in projects ranging from developing software to create automatic summaries of websites - for improving the efficiency of searches - to checking the accuracy of translations between Chinese and English.
The centre was also developing collaborative links with researchers at universities on the mainland and in Germany, Australia, Canada, Japan and Singapore, 15 of whom were joining a three-day symposium starting tomorrow at CityU.