The Department of Linguistics and Translation (LT) of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS) hosted the 21st Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop (CLSW2020) from 28 to 30 May 2020. Over the past two decades, this annual event has been held in different cities across the Asia-Pacific region, and become one of the most influential platforms for lexical semantic research exchange, dialogue and collaboration. Yet, for the very first time, this year the conference has to be conducted online in the forms of Zoom webinar and live broadcast via YouTube and Douyu platforms in real-time, due to the pandemic.
Commencing the event were the opening remarks by CityU’s Provost Professor Alex JEN and Dean of CLASS Professor Richard M WALKER, who extended their congratulations on the successful hosting of CLSW2020 and highlighted the achievements of the University and its humanities and social sciences disciplines. Key founders of CLSW Professor HUANG Chu-ren, Professor Benjamin T’SOU Ka-yin and Professor CHENG Chin-chuan were then invited to share the history, development and significance of CLSW, and how it was organised in 2003 when the SARS pandemic struck. Before moving on to the workshop sessions, Head of LT and the Chairperson of the CLSW2020 organising committee Professor LIU Meichun expressed her gratitude to all people who helped make the conference possible.
CLSW2020 encompassed six keynote speeches and four panel sessions. On 28 May 2020, Professor Adele E GOLDBERG of Princeton University and Professor Martin HILPERT of University of Neuchâtel delivered two keynote speeches titled “Constructing Meaning” and “Constructions and their Collocates: What Lexical Semantics can teach us about the Meaning of Grammar” respectively. In between, there was the first panel session “Chinese Language Acquisition, Teaching and Testing”. It was further divided into morning and afternoon sessions, each with five academics making an individual report on a topic surrounding the theme.
The participants’ rewarding journey continued on 29 May 2020, where Professor Kenneth Ward CHURCH of Baidu Research spoke on “Subwords, Seriously?” and Dr ZHOU Ming of Microsoft Research Asia discoursed on the theme “Progress and Challenges of Natural Language Processing Based on Neural Networks” in their keynote speeches. Three panel sessions titled “Formal Approaches to Lexical Semantics”, “Lexical Semantics in Chinese Linguistics”, and “Computational Lexical Semantics” were also arranged on the same day, with a total of 15 speakers gave their presentations and thousands of participants around the world actively raised questions and engaged in academic exchanges.
For a strong finish, two keynote speeches were scheduled in the morning of 30 May 2020. Professor LI Ping of the Faculty of Humanities of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University shared his insight into the topic “Neurocognitive Approaches to Lexical Semantic Representations in First and Second Languages”. Professor QU Weiguang of Nanjing Normal University presented his research on “Abstract Meaning Representation, Resource Construction and its Application”.
In the closing ceremony following the keynote speeches, Professor Huang Chu-ren first expressed his gratitude to the organising committee and all supporting staff members, and gave an introduction to the book “From Minimal Contrast to Meaningful Construct” published after last year’s conference. Then, Professor SU Qi of Peking University introduced the publication channels of the conference papers, and Professor Qu Weiguang of Nanjing Normal University, the organiser of next year’s CLSW, shared about the preparatory works and information on paper submissions. The conference came to a perfect ending with Professor Liu Meichun concluding the remarkable results attained during these three days, and rounds of applause from the participants in front of their devices.
Turning an event of such scale from a physical one to an online one was not easy, but having close to 5,000 participants joining through various platform proves the effort to be worthwhile.
Cover photo: (from left) CityU’s Provost Professor Alex Jen (on screen), Head of LT and the Chairperson of the CLSW2020 organising committee Professor Liu Meichun, Dean of CLASS Professor Richard M Walker and Professor Benjamin T’sou Ka-yin deliver opening remarks and introduce CLSW prior to the workshop sessions.
