On December 16th, the 2018 International Symposium on Language Resources and Intelligence, co-hosted by ACLR and the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) of the University of Pennsylvania was held in BLCU. Nearly 200 experts and scholars in related fields from countries and regions including China, Hong Kong China, the United States, France, South Korea, Japan, Russia and Singapore, participated in the event. They had discussions on the latest achievements and trends in the field of language resources and intelligence in an effort to make contributions to human language life as well as the intelligent and efficient development of modern society.
The Symposium consisted of 2 keynote speeches, 9 invited speeches and a panel discussion.
During the Symposium, Prof. Li Yuming, Director of ACLR, and Prof. Mark Liberman, Director of LDC, made keynote speeches respectively. Prof. Li Yuming has long been focusing on the protection of language resources. In the keynote speech entitled The Concept and Practice for Protecting Language Resource of China, he noted that in recent years language resource has been playing an important role in human society, and language resource protection has been receiving more and more attention from the society. Based on this idea, Prof. Li Yuming called upon countries, regions, international organizations as well as social sectors and disciplines to cooperate closely and develop a set of technological and working standards to jointly protect the rich language resources worldwide. In his keynote speech, named Language Resources, Intelligence, and Community, Prof. Mark Liberman reviewed the important role of a large-scale effective research community in the development of language resources and artificial intelligence and discussed the overall development trend in the future.
9 renowned scholars from home and abroad gave invited speeches on three topics including Language Resource Protection, Construction and Application of Domain Language Resources and Construction of Language and Artificial Intelligence Discipline and Talents Cultivation. Professor Huang Xing, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Prof. Ding Shiqing, Minzu University of China and Prof. Daniel Glon, senior interpreter of International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC) discussed the significance and existing measures of Language Resource Protection by delivering speeches respectively on the “Protection of the Cross-border Language Resources of China”, “Protection of Chinese Minority Language Resources: Data and Status Quo”, and “Saving World Languages Using…Logograms”. Prof. Bellassen, renowned sinologist, Ms. Song Zhiyi, manager of the LDC program, and Prof. Kenneth Church from Baidu Research shared their academic achievements around the topic of Construction and Application of Field Language Resources by making reports respectively on Learning Resources for Chinese Language Education in the Context of the Chinese Teaching as a Discipline, Creation of Language Packs for Low Resource Languages, and Corpus Methods in a Digitized World. Prof. Sun Maosong, Tsinghua University, Prof. Wang Hui, Zhejiang Normal University and Prof. Xun Endong, BLCU respectively delivered reports on A Preliminary Review and Analysis of the Linguistics-related Curriculum from the Computational Perspective, Language Situation and Language Policies of the “Belt and Road” Countries: Reflections in the New Era and Research and Development of Language Resources for Artificial Intelligence: Theory and Methods, trying to discuss Construction of Language and Artificial Intelligence Discipline and Talents Cultivation with the participants.
Prof. Yang Erhong, Executive Deputy Director of ACLR, moderated a panel discussion on Talents Cultivation on Language Resource and Intelligence. Prof. Chu-Ren Huang, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Prof. Sun Maosong, Tsinghua University, Dr. Yuan Jiahong, Deputy Director of LDC, Prof. Xun Endong, BLCU and Dr. Hu Renfen, Beijing Normal University expressed their insights on how to cultivate talents and develop disciplines in the intelligence era with the language resources.
The symposium lasted for 2 days, and the meeting on December 17th was held at Beijing Penn Wharton China Center.There were 13 keynote speeches, 7 of which were about Clinical Application of Language Data and Technology to explore the relationship between language and medicine for the benefit of human health.
During the Symposium on Dec. 16th, ACLR appointed Prof. Mark Liberman as the International Academic Advisor and Dr. Yuan Jiahong as the Honorary Researcher. A ceremony was held and Director Li Yuming issued the letters of appointment to Prof. Liberman and Dr. Yuan.
