Chiang Chen Chair Professor of Linguistics and Language Sciences

"Technology and Industry enhance socio-economic development in society, whereas language and communications are the pillars of human civilization and socio-harmony. The Research Centre on Linguistics and Language Information Sciences has been strenuously promoting the synergy of science, humanities and social sciences in language research. The Chiang Chen Industrial Charity Foundation is pleased to establish the Chiang Chen Chair Professor of Linguistics and Language Sciences to assist The Hong Kong Institute of Education to gain new heights in language sciences research, so as to cultivate talents and to advance the global development of language information technology."

Chiang Chen Industrial Charity Foundation

Benjamin Tsou Ka Yin

Language is unique to man and its importance can hardly be overrated. The Research Centre on Linguistics and Language Information Sciences and its predecessor have synergically drawn on the sciences and humanities to conduct meaningful basic and applied research on the Chinese language under its founder, Professor Benjamin Tsou.

In 1995, he launched a unique and still on-going project to track and analyze the Pan-Chinese characteristics and evolving use of the Chinese language involving the sophisticated processing of more than 400 million Chinese characters thus far. This LIVAC project and related research efforts have impacted on different research areas and organizations in Asia, North America and Europe. Its by-products have included contributions to diverse areas such as authoritative lexicographical works, the cultivation of Chinese-English bilingual parallel corpora for Machine Translation enhancement, and textual sentiment analysis.

Through quantitative and qualitative analysis of language variation in space and time, and their non-linguistic covariants, he has shed new light on the origin of the Chinese logographic writing system, entropy of the Chinese language, importance of tonal variations, neologistic developments, and language contact.

He has also contributed much to the 2006 launching of the first large-scale standardized language test on Cantonese oral language (HKCOLAS), and subsequently, the first electronic platform (ACKER) for the parallel alignment of Classical-Colloquial Chinese texts and computerized Chinese idioms Cross-word Puzzle Games.

Professor Benjamin Tsou obtained his MA in Linguistics from Harvard University and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. He taught at the University of California, San Diego, the University of Hong Kong and City University of Hong Kong before joining The Hong Kong Institute of Education in 2010.

His various awards and honours include: foreign member, Acad?mie Royale des Sciences d'Outre-Mer, Belgium; Fellow, Chartered Institute of Linguists, UK; Bronze Bauhinia Star, HKSAR, Tan Lark Sye Visiting Professorship at Nanyang Technological University. He also held Visiting Professorship and honorary research positions at several universities such as University of British Columbia; University of California, Berkeley; Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris; Australian National University; Fudan University; Chulalorngkorn University, and Peking University.

Professor Tsou has many publications, including dictionaries. His research efforts have been commended by various official agencies. Among these is the Language Atlas of China for which he was also a general editor and contributor which was awarded a Class I prize for research by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1998.