Professor Luke Kang Kwong from the Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies wins Outstanding Researcher Award

Professor Luke Kang Kwong received an Outstanding Researcher Award at an Award Presentation Ceremony for Excellence in Teaching and Research held at the University of Hong Kong on February 19, 2009.

Professor Luke was given this prestigious award for his ground-breaking research in the field of Chinese Linguistics. For over twenty years he has researched into the Chinese language using innovative methods and techniques from a variety of disciplines, including Linguistics, Conversation Analysis, Corpus Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, and Cognitive Neuroscience.

He was the first to apply the methodology of Conversation Analysis to the study of Chinese using naturally occurring speech data. The major findings of this research were published in two books, Utterance-Final Particles in Cantonese Conversation and Telephone Calls: Unity and Diversity in the Structure of Telephone Conversations Across Languages and Cultures. On the basis of these speech data, he has constructed the Hong Kong University Cantonese Corpus, which has provided researchers with authentic data for in-depth investigations of the structure and functions of Cantonese. More recently he has researched into the interface between language structure and conversational turn-taking by focusing on the phenomenon of sentence completion. This line of research is being pursued in collaboration with scholars in Hong Kong, Canada and Germany.

Another area in which Professor Luke has done innovative work is the interaction between tone and intonation in Chinese. Using a combination of phonological and instrumental analysis, he has mapped out a solution to the longstanding problem of how tone and intonation work, now in collaboration and now in competition, in tone-rich languages.

Professor Luke has also worked together with computer engineers in the field of Natural Language Processing. This has resulted in the publication of a series of papers on word segmentation, parts-of-speech tagging, word sense disambiguation, new word recognition and abbreviation expansion in Chinese. He has also helped the IBM research lab in Beijing develop voice recognition applications for Cantonese, which has resulted in automatic phone-transaction systems now being widely used in Hong Kong.

In recent years Professor Luke has moved into yet another new inter-disciplinary research area, Language and Cognitive Neuroscience. In collaboration with scholars in this field and using latest neuroimaging techniques, he has published several influential articles on syntactic and semantic processing in Chinese and English, and the relationship between language and colour perception.