Abstract:
The humanities tell the stories of our shared human experience, strengthen communities, and help bridge divides.  -Ohio Humanities Council

Humanities focuses on understanding meaning, purpose, and goals and furthers the appreciation of singular historical and social phenomena.   – Wilhelm Dilthey on ‘Human Sciences’

This talk focuses on how we can turn the multitude of data points (e.g., big data) into the story of the purpose and goals, to understand meaning of ourselves and our society. In particular we will answer three research questions. First how can language tell the story of the purpose and goals, and interpret the meaning of ourselves and our society? Second, what are the linguistic devices for expressing meaning, purpose, and goal? What are the linguistic cues that can be used to discover them? And third, how to interpret with linguistic cues the purpose, goals and meaning of ourselves and our society? To answer these questions, we underline Language’s nature as a dynamic self-adaptive complex system that is consisted of many linked small worlds and formed by many relations. As such, language big data or corpora offers continuous sampling over the continuum of time and space. To construct a narrative to explicate this complex system we must adopt and End-to-End paradigm by partitioning the data in more than one way, e.g., both diachronic and cross-sectional. This will allow us to tell a story, especially how and why it happened and to Interpret it with a shared conceptual framework/ontology. Several examples will be provided to illustrate the points raised.

Biography:

Chu-Ren Huang is a Chair Professor in the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Focusing on Chinese, computational, and corpus linguistics, he is fascinated by what language can tell us about human cognition and our collective reactions to natural and social environments. He approaches these questions with a deep and comprehensive study of the Chinese language. His recent books on Chinese include A Reference Grammar of Chinese (Cambridge), the Routledge Handbook on Chinese Applied Linguistics, and the Cambridge Handbook of Chinese Linguistics, His recent papers appeared in Behavior Research Methods; Computational Linguistics; Cognitive Linguistics; Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theories; Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Knowledge-based Systems; Language, Cognition and Neuroscience; Language Resources and Evaluation; Lingua; Natural Language Engineering; PLoS One; etc.