Supporting Impactful Research: MOE AcRF Tier 1 Grant Awarded to Asst. Prof. Haoze Li

Assistant Professor Haoze Li has been awarded the MOE AcRF Tier 1 Grant (August 2025) for his research project A multimodal approach to sentence-final particles in Mandarin.

Abstract:

Human communication is inherently multimodal, combining speech, intonation, gesture, and shared cultural context. Less than 0.2% of spoken utterances occur without a co-speech gesture (Grondin-Verdon et al. 2024), highlighting the need for linguistic theories that go beyond text and speech alone. Yet current approaches remain partial, constrained by two challenges: the construction of richly annotated multimodal datasets has been prohibitively labor-intensive (Knight & Adolphs 2021; Huang 2021), and existing linguistic frameworks have difficulty capturing the layered interactions of speech, gesture, and prosody. This project addresses these gaps through two goals. First, it develops a theoretical framework for the multimodal expression of sentence-final particles (SFPs) in Mandarin, elements that are highly sensitive to gesture and prosodic cues. Second, it employs computer vision tools to build a large-scale, richly annotated multimodal dataset tailored for studying their grammar. By combining theoretical and computational approaches, the project will advance our understanding of Mandarin communication, set new standards for multimodal corpus development, and provide transferable methods for cross-linguistic and interdisciplinary research on human communication.

Congratulations, Prof Li!