Keynote Speakers

Emeritus Chair Professor (CityUHK), Visiting Professor (HKUST) and member, Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer (Belgium), Benjamin , Tsou obtained his MA from Harvard University and PhD from U. C. Berkeley.

Since 1995, his team has been cultivating LIVAC, the Pan-Chinese Synchronous Corpus, with over 6 billion characters, covering Beijing, Hongkong, Macau, Shanghai, Singapore and Taipei. Many notable dictionaries have benefited from it (e.g. Oxford Chinese - English Dictionary 2010). In 2018, his team launched : (1) A Chinese-English Scientific-technical Compound Word Platform, with over 1 million entries, and (2) A computer aided Chinese-English Translation Platform for professional teachers of translation and translators (https://patentlex.chilin.hk) as well as a big database of parallel Chinese-English sentence pairs suitable for training MT engines.

His publications include: Chinese Language and Chinese Society, Anthology on Language Contact, A Textbook on Sociolinguistics, Quantitative and Computational Studies on the Chinese Language, Linguistic Corpus and Corpus Linguistics in the Chinese Context (Journal of Chinese Linguistics, Monograph No 25), OUP Bibliographies: Sociolinguistic Aspects of the Chinese Language. The Language of Atlas of China, of which he is an editor and contributor, was awarded a Class 1 prize in research by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1998.

He began his research on Chinese-English machine translation at MIT and subsequently headed the Chinese-English Translation project at U. C. Berkeley. He is the founding president of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and the founding head of the Department of Applied Linguistics (now Department of Linguistics and T ranslation) at CityUHK. In recent years, he has been promoting the use of Big Data and computer processing of natural language in cross-linguistic research and translation.