The UM Confucius Institute has invited Professor Liu Lening, Director of the Chinese Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures of Columbia University, and Professor Yuan Yulin from Peking University and Director of the Chinese Language Society, to conduct online academic seminars on “Language and Culture” that commenced on 16 September 2020. Professor Xu Jie, Interim Director of the UM Confucius Institute chaired and facilitated the discussion during the seminars.
On 16 September 2020, Professor Liu conducted a presentation on the topic of “What is the future of Chinese language?”, and discussed the grammatical forms of semantic domain “future” in Chinese language and some new developments in grammar that may shape the future of Chinese language to certain extent.
On 23 September 2020, Professor Yuan delivered his presentation on “How linguistic knowledge and its resources nudge the ‘explainable’ artificial intelligence” and introduced the important technical routes and research methods of using language knowledge resources to help machines perform semantic understanding and commonsense reasoning.
For the full version, please refer to the Chinese version.