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Overview

ICMC2021: 2021 International Conference on Multimodal Communication:
Emerging Computational and Technical Methods
11 & 12 December 2021, Changsha

Conference Program

Each presentation slot is 45 minutes, within which there is a period at the end of about 10 minutes for both Q & A and a break.

 

      

Hunan Normal University, Changsha, 11 & 12 December 2021

Local Venue: Lecture Hall R613, Foreign Studies College, Hunan Normal University
Conference directors: ZENG Yanyu and Mark Turner
会议负责人：曾艳钰教授、Mark Turner教授

The 2021 Hunan Normal University International Conference on Languages and Cultures has as its theme EMERGING COMPUTATIONAL AND TECHNICAL METHODS

Conference Theme

Science often advances through the amassing of great ranges of data and the invention of new methods of analyzing data. In genomics, astrophysics, materials science, energy, and many other fields, science is making great leaps because of new methods for amassing, sharing, and analyzing data. ICMC 2021 will focus on emerging computational, statistical, and technical methods for the study of language, communication, translation, and intercultural encounters.

Confirmed Conference Plenary Speakers

  1. Mark Turner. Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science, Case Western Reserve University.  Co-director, the International Distributed Little Red Hen Lab.
  2. Jennifer Hinnell. Killam postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia.
  3. Harald Baayen. Professor of Quantitative Linguistics, University of Tübingen.
  4. Tiago Torrent. Professor, Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, Faculdade de Letras. PI of FrameNet Brasil.
  5. Inés Olza. Researcher, Institute for Culture and Society (ICS), University of Navarra.
  6. Peter Uhrig. Post-doctoral reseacher in English Linguistics and Computational Corpus Linguistics at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg.
  7. DENG Yunhua. Professor, Foreign Studies College, Hunan Normal University.
  8. LIU Zhengguang. Professor, Hunan Normal University.
  9. Lars Nowak. Professor, Hunan Normal University.
  10. Irina Kaldrack. Professor, Hunan Normal University.
  11. ZHANG Hui. Distinguished Professor and Doctoral Supervisor, Nanjing Normal University.

Detailed Descriptions of Plenary Talks


Opening Ceremony: Download the recording.
Closing Ceremony: Download the recording.

 
Mark Turner. Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science, Case Western Reserve University.  Co-director, the International Distributed Little Red Hen Lab

Title: Computational Tools for Researching Frames and Frame Blending. Download the recording or view the talk on YouTube:

Abstract: Human beings think largely by using mental operations they already have to work on conceptual arrays they already know. Some of their knowledge is organized into mental bundles that we call “mental frames,” “conceptual frames,” or just “frames” (Fillmore 1968, 1976, 1977a, 1977b, 1982, 1985, 2013; Fillmore, Kay & O’Connor 1988; Fillmore & Atkins 1992, 1994; Lowe et al. 1997). Some of these frames are so important to communication that we expect every native speaker of a language to have them, or at least, highly similar versions of them. The language presupposes their existence. For example, when someone says, “I have to call my stockbroker,” everyone can activate the appropriate mental package, the appropriate conceptual bundle of related elements. We imagine, unless we are told or have reason to believe otherwise, that the telephone call is about buying and selling securities. Nobody needs to explain that the call is about buying and selling securities, because the word “stockbroker” calls up that frame. Frames are often blended. For example, as Fillmore and Atkins show, if we blend the frames for chance and harm, the result is risk—a chance of harm, as in "You are running a risk." There is emergent structure in the blend: hope. And if we also blend in the frame for choice, then we have a different version of risk, as in "You are taking a risk." But how do we use data science to study the vast mental operations of framing and frame blending? This talk will review recent data science tools for locating and analyzing frames and frame blends in vast data.

 

 
Jennifer Hinnell is a Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada). As a cognitive linguist, her research applies corpus linguistic (text and multimedia), motion capture, and experimental methods to the investigation of language, especially the co-expression of grammatical and conceptual notions in co-speech gesture, the role of gesture in discourse processes, and more. Her research has been published in journals (e.g., Language and Cognition, Cognitive Linguistics, The American Journal of Semiotics, Frontiers, Languages in Contrast, among others) and book chapters, and she was co-editor of Language and the Creative Mind (2013). Jennifer has been an invited speaker in the USA, Asia, and Europe, as well as a Visiting Scholar at the Human Technology Centre (RWTH Aachen University, Germany). She holds an MA in linguistics from Simon Fraser University and a PhD in linguistics from the University of Alberta, where she was awarded the 2020 Governor General’s Gold Medal for her research. She is a frequent reviewer, a member of the international collaborative multimodality lab Red Hen, and Emerging Scholars Representative of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association.

Title: “So anyways…”: Quantifying the body in interactional data. Download the recording.

Abstract: One only has to look around a room full of people to see that language consists of more than words on a page (or screen) or a highly patterned audio signal. In conversation, in addition to the speech sounds normally associated with language, speakers use their hands, shoulders, and head, and manipulate their facial expressions in ways that are semantically and temporally aligned with their speech. Over recent decades, usage-based and cognitively-oriented fields have moved beyond text and speech in isolation and increasingly centered face-to-face interaction as the primary starting point for linguistic analysis, a move that demands an account of the contribution of such meaningful body movements to the linguistic message. But how do we systematically capture the meaning and conventionalized nature of co-speech body behaviour alongside speech? New advances in technology offer opportunities for the study of the body signal as part of linguistic conventions. In this talk, I introduce a series of studies that explore the co-speech behaviours aligned with specific speech utterances, especially in highly stanced colloquial pragmatic markers (e.g., so anyways, at any rate, however). Focussing on (semi)fixed, frequently-used, multiword units (known as constructions) in North American English discourse, I demonstrate that such conventionalized units in speech have gestural counterparts. In addition to outlining the methods that can support a quantitative analysis of multimodal linguistic data, I address the empirical challenges that come to the fore when we include the body signal in a cognitive, constructionist approach to language.

 

 

 

 
Harald Baayen. Professor of Quantitative Linguistics, Eberhard-Karls University, Tuebingen, Germany. Harald Baayen studied general linguistics with Geert Booij in Amsterdam, and obtained his PhD degree in 1989 with a quantitative study on morphological productivity. From 1990 to 1998 he was a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. In 1998, upon receiving a career advancement award from the Dutch Science Foundation, he became associate professor at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, thanks to a Muller chair supported by the Dutch Academy of Sciences. In 2007 he took up a full professorship at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. In 2011 he received an Alexander von Humboldt research award from Germany, which brought him to the University of Tübingen. An ERC advanced grant is supporting his current research programme on discriminative learning. Harald Baayen has published widely in international journals, including Psychological Review, Language, Journal of Memory and Language, Cognition, Complexity, Behavior Research Methods, PLoS ONE, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Journal of Phonetics, and the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. He published a monograph on word frequency distributions with Kluwer, and an introductory textbook on statistical analysis (with R) for the language sciences with Cambridge University Press.

Title: Explorations into gesture. Download the recording.

Abstract: In this presentation, I will report on two lines of research in which gestures, as registered in the Red Hen Lab data on English, play a role. The first study addresses the acoustic durations of homophones. Gahl (2008) observed, using the Switchboard corpus, that for homophone pairs such as thyme and time, the higher-frequency word (time) tends to have shorter spoken duration than its lower-frequency counterpart (thyme). We have replicated this finding for the Red Hen Lab data on English. Furthermore, using the gesture annotations in this corpus, there is evidence that the kind of gestures that co-occur with homophones may differ. The second study addresses how we can analyse the trajectories made, for instance, by the hand, in the 2-D space obtained by extracting position from a series of video stills. Here, the generalized additive mixed model is a promising tool. Building on earlier experience with analysing the articulatory trajectories made by the tongue during speech, I will show how, in principle, it is possible to investigate how movement trajectories in articulatory space could change as a function of both categorical variables (e.g., semantic categories) and numeric covariates (e.g., frequency of use of the word uttered during the gesture).

 

 

 

 
Tiago Timponi Torrent. Tiago Torrent is a Professor of Linguistics at the Portuguese Language and Linguistics Department of the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, in Brazil. He earned a doctorate degree in Cognitive Linguistics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro with a Visiting Researcher period at the Linguistics Department of the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2010, he is the head of the FrameNet Brasil Computational Linguistics Lab, conducting research on Natural Language Understanding with Semantic Frames and Grammatical Constructions. He is also one of the founding partners of the Global FrameNet initiative and has been recently awarded the ABRALIN Language Technology and Innovation Prize by the Brazilian Linguistics Association.

Title: Collaboration is all you need: a plan for a multilingual, multimodal and multicentric FrameNet. Download the recording.

Abstract: The past two decades of research on language models have witnessed an apparent irreconcilable dispute between data-driven and curation-oriented researchers. The first have relied on ever larger amounts of raw text and transformers to build models based on unsupervised approaches to machine learning. The latter have been building structured theoretically grounded models based on corpus analysis and annotation by intensively trained linguists. In this talk, I'll make the claim that this dispute is not irreconcilable and support such a claim with a plan for developing a multilingual, multimodal and multicentric FrameNet. I'll also demonstrate software tools built for lending feasibility for the proposed plan, namely, the FrameNet Brasil WebTool and Lutma, a frame maker tool.

 

 
Inés Olza. Senior Research Fellow in General Linguistics at the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra (Spain), where she directs the Multimodal Pragmatics Lab. She earned her PhD in Spanish Linguistics in 2009 (University of Navarra), with Extraordinary Prize and European Mention. She has been invited researcher at several universities and institutions: University of Antwerp (Belgium, 2006 and 2007), University of Bergen (Norway, 2011), University of Birmingham (UK, 2012), University of Santiago de Compostela (2008, Spain), University of Murcia (2020, Spain), and the European Court of Justice (Luxembourg, 2017). Olza has authored several dozens publications on Pragmatics, Cognitive Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics and Discourse Analysis: e.g. articles published in Journal of Pragmatics, PLOS ONE, Metaphor and Symbol, Review of Cognitive Linguistics or Languages in Contrast, among others; monograph Corporalidad y lenguaje (Peter Lang, 2011). Her research has focused so far on Spanish, English, German and French. Since 2013, she has been an active member of the Spanish chapter of the Red Hen Lab for the Study of Multimodal Communication.

Title: Multimodality, corpora and the grammar-pragmatics interface. Download the recording.

Abstract: In this talk, I will rely on a recent case study—mixed-method analysis of multimodal constructions for negation and disagreement in English—to reflect on the advances that multimodal corpora have brought about in linguistic research, and in the understanding of the grammar-pragmatics interface in particular. Big multimodal data like the NewsScape-Red Hen database allow us to easily compile several thousands of ecologically valid examples of use of a concrete verbal routine that can be now analyzed as part of the full multimodal behavior deployed by the speakers in interaction –i.e. words along with gestures, prosody and physical interaction with the space and other speakers. The case study is part of a wider project (MultiNeg: bit.ly/multineg) that aims to build a comprehensive cognitive model to understand the continuum between negation and disagreement, that is, between the different values exhibited by particles like no way in examples such as the following: (1) There’s no way that 12 people can sit there (NBC, 04/01/2015), where no way conveys grammatical negation and works at the propositional scope of the sentence; and (2) –What we having tonight? –Roast chicken with leak and apple. –No way! You serious? (KNBC, 04/01/2015), where the particle behaves as a pragmatic marker of interactive disagreement that constitutes a speech turn on its own. As I will explain, a mixed-method multimodal analysis of 1,500 instances of no way drawn from (just) a three-month period in NewsScape made us (re)think the grammar-pragmatics frontiers that have traditionally supported the distinctions described in examples (1) and (2). Our results rather support the existence of a single no way multimodal construction that flexibly adjusts to the interactional dynamics. In this presentation, I will show how adding the multimodal (gestural) layer in our analysis substantially turned the negation-disagreement continuum that we initially posited into a unified view of the no-way-construction that may better account for its contextual versatility.


Peter Uhrig is an assistant professor of English linguistics at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany. His research interests are in cognitive linguistics and computational corpus linguistics with a focus on multimodality. He is a major contributor to the Distributed Little Red Hen Lab, the International Multimodal Communication Centre at the University of Oxford and is technical secretary of ICAME.

Title: Multimodal Corpus Linguistics and Machine Learning Methods for Multimodal Communication Research. Download the recording.

Abstract: Empirical research on multimodal communication has long been hindered by the fact that researchers have to watch countless hours of video to collect sufficient data in the wild. In this lecture, I am going to present a wide range of computational tools and approaches that help us to index and search multimodal corpora based on verbal and visual features. Based on work carried out to create the NewsScape English Corpus, spelling normalization, NLP, forced alignment, and various kinds of video-annotation based on state-of-the art machine learning are combined in a corpus processing pipeline, the results of which are then indexed and made available via a web-based corpus query interface. The presentation will include a demonstration of typical data retrieval and annotation workflows for researchers who want to use multimodal corpus resources.

     

DENG Yunhua is currently Professor and Doctoral Supervisor of the Foreign Studies College at Hunan Normal University. She serves as the Council Member of the Cognitive Linguistics Association of China and Council Member of the Linguistics Association of Hunan Province. She worked as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Missouri (2004-2005). She won the honorary titles of "academic leader of colleges and universities" in Hunan Province and "young backbone teacher" of Hunan Province. Professor Deng specializes in linguistic theories, linguistic typology, contrastive study of English and Chinese. She has been in charge of 4 National Social Science Fund Projects. She has published 4 scholarly monographs and more than 80 theses, including 26 CSSCI journal theses, like Foreign Language Teaching and Research and Journal of Foreign Languages. She was awarded the third prize for Philosophy and Social Science Achievement in Hunan Province and the second prize for Teaching Achievement in Hunan Province.

Title: A Multivariate Analysis of the Subjectivity of the “Verbalized Color Word+Object” Construction in English and Chinese. Download the recording.

Abstract: Based on the COCA, CCL, and BCC corpora, this paper investigates the similarities and differences of subjectivity in the English and Chinese “verbalized color word+object” construction, aiming mainly to explore the cognitive processing mechanisms that underlie the subjective tendency. With a multinomial logistic regression model and multiple correspondence analysis, this research focused on the following questions: (1) Does the construction of “verbalized color word+object” tend to be subjective or objective in English and Chinese? (2) Are there any common factors influencing the subjectivity in this construction between English and Chinese ? (3) Compared with English, are there any significant differences in the factors determining the subjectivity of the construction in Chinese? A series of independent variables was used to calculate the significant influencing factors and the interaction effect between the factors. The motivation for this research was to help English learners and Chinese learners to have a better understanding of the “verbalized color word+object” construction from lexical, semantic, and pragmatic aspects.

     

LIU Zhengguang, Professor at Hunan Normal University, received his PhD from Beijing Foreign Studies University and finished his post-doctoral research at Shanghai International University. His excellence in research ability and leadership led to his being named State Council Expert with Special Allowance, New Century Talent of the Ministry of Education, and Director of the Hunan Provincial Advisory Committee on Foreign Language Teaching in Higher Education. Professor Liu has held senior positions at a number of high-profile academic organizations. He has been Dean of the School of Foreign Language Studies in Hunan University since 2004, where he is a member of the University Academic Committee and a PhD supervisor. He has been a referee and a peer-reviewer for core academic journals such as Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, Journal of Foreign Languages, and Modern Foreign Languages. Professor Liu has coordinated 3 projects of National Social Science Fund and more than 20 provincial research projects. He has authored more than 110 articles that were published, cited and reprinted in core journals. Out of the 5 monographs that he authored and/or (co-)edited, the Linguistic Decategorization: An Integral Part of Linguistic Categorization was highly recommended by Lu Jianming (senior leading scholar in Mandarin Chinese research) as a work that completed and developed the theory of linguistic categorization with its innovative and pioneering analysis in theory construction and its impact in boosting cognitive research into human cognition and languages. Now Professor Liu has been focusing on the study of the interactive correlation between spatiality &temporality and semantic features and syntactic realizations. He has put a very insightful hypothesis of time-space conflation which has drawn wide attention and can provide consistent explanation to syntactic-semantic issues in Mandarin Chinese.

Title: Converging evidence for the time-space conflation in Mandarin Chinese. Download the recording.

Abstract: In contrast to the dichotomous conceptualization of time and space in English as shown by the distinctive modes of grounding for nouns, verbs or clauses, Mandarin Chinese is hypothesized in this paper to be characterized by time-space conflation. Evidence for this hypothesis can be found in ancient Chinese conceptualization of the universe（Yuzhou 宇宙），which referred to both space and time. Originally, 宇（Yu）refers to the eaves of a house and 宙（Zhou）to the ridgepoles and beams which support the house and determine its life span. 宇 is metonymically extended to denote the four cardinal directions (East, South, West and North) and 宙 to denote time (from the past, present to the future). Linguistic evidence for the hypothesis can also be found at almost every level of the language system. In the formation of Chinese characters, Mandarin Chinese not only follows the linearity principle in positioning the radicals, but the radical positioning will also have something to do with the overall meaning of the character, like the radical “日”（Ri) expressing morning or early time of the day when placed on the left or the top of the character, or evening or late time of the day when placed on the left or lower part of the character. Another crucial piece of evidence is the optionality of grounding of nouns and verbs, and even the sentence itself. The third source of data is the functional fusion of nouns and verbs, apart from their general division of labour. The fourth piece of evidence is the multifunctionality of grammatical classes, like 着（Zhe) which can denote both existential and ongoing process readings. The fifth piece of evidence is the mutifunctionality of 零句（minor sentences）（Zhao Yuanren 1968). Three more typical but unique features of Cenote both spatial and temporal meanings. The time-space conflation hypothesis which differs from the overgeneralization of Noun-Verb Inclusion Theory (Shen Jiaxuan 2016) offers coherent and consistent accounts for “idiosyncrasies”, like the seemingly contradictory directions of the temporal reference of Qian (front) and Hou (back), which remains a controversial issue both in linguistics and cultural studies; and other essential features of Chinese, like subjectivity, topic-prominence, and the integrative cognitive style of Chinese thinking.

     

Lars Nowak is a full-time professor at Hunan Normal University. He received his Ph.D in Philosophy from the Bauhaus University in Weimar in 2009. Since 2011, he has been a junior professor at Friedrich-Alexander University in Germany, engaged in media research (visual and image culture direction). From 2019 to 2020, Lars Nowak served as a visiting professor at the Free University of Berlin, mainly teaching drama and film. Lars Nowak’s research direction is film and media. During his research career, he has published more than 50 papers and monographs.

Title: Negative Multimodality—On Divergences of Image and Language in Comics and Films. Download the recording.

Abstract: In my paper, I examine the semiological and perceptual relations between image and language by looking at the interplay between image and writing in comics as well as image and speech in films. In doing so, I analyze temporal, spatial, diegetic, and semiotic divergences between the two modes and claim that under certain conditions these divergences can be conceived as negations, distinguishing between contrary and contradictory as well as constative and performative variants. In this way, it is shown that the relations of images to other modes constitute an important domain in which this mode, which is often denied the capacity of negation in favor of language, proves to be quite capable of this semiotic operation.

     

Irina Kaldrack is a full-time professor at Hunan Normal University. In 2009, she received her Ph.D. degree from Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. Irina Kaldrack has published many papers in major journals on digital media technology and practice in Germany. In collaboration with Christoph Ernst, Jens Schröter and Andreas Sudmann, she edited the 21st issue of Zeitschrift für Medienwisseschaft about artificial intelligence. She directs the program on “The Entanglement between Gesture, Media, and Politics,” funded by the VW Foundation.

Title: Modeling the Gestural. Download the recording.

Abstract: I argue that gesture and its function must be reconsidered with respect to current media technology, and accordingly that gestural communication itself must be conceptually remodeled. I propose that gesture has three dimensions: a symbolic dimension, a dimension of action, and a media dimension. The lecture outlines the main historical lines of European thoughts on gesture and shows the shifting meanings of what a gesture is. Currently the three dimensions are being remodeled to focus on the entanglement of gesture with media.

     

ZHANG Hui is the distinguished professor and doctoral supervisor of Nanjing Normal University. His many appointments include secretary general and vice president of the Professional Committee of Cognitive Linguistics of the China Association for Comparative Studies of English and Chinese, vice president of the Jiangsu Foreign Linguistics Association, vice president of the Professional Committee of the Chinese Association of Psycholinguistics, vice president of the Professional Committee of the China Association for Neurolinguistic Study of Modern Chinese, vice president of the Professional Committee of China Association of Discourse Analysis, “Chu Tian Scholar” of Hu Bei province, and expert reviewer of the National Social Science Found. His major research projects completed or under research include the program of National Social Science Found Research on Neurocognitive Mechanism of Chinese Idiom Comprehension, the program of National Social Science Found Research on the Neurocognitive Mechanism of Chinese English learners' Syntactic Processing, the program of The National Natural Science Foundation of China Cognitive Research on Chinese Idiom System Based on Event Related Potentials, the subprogram of National Social Science Found Neurocognitive Study of Lexicology, the program of National Social Science Found Neurocognitive Study of Syntactic Processing of Chinese as Second Language and Individual Differences. His major publications consist of Idioms and Their Comprehension: A Cognitive Semantic Perspective, Cognitive Metonymy (Second Prize of Jiangsu Excellent Achievement Award in Philosophy and Social Sciences), Study on Cognitive Semantics, Idiom Representation and Processing: A Neurocognitive Approach (First Prize of Jiangsu Excellent Achievement Award in Philosophy and Social Sciences) and so on. He has already published more than 100 papers on important academic journals such as Journal of Neurolinguistics, Lingua, Journal of Language and Politics, Second Language Research, Frontier in Psychology, Australian Journal of Linguistics, Foreign Language Teaching and Research, Modern Foreign Languages, and Journal of Foreign Languages. His present research is on cognitive linguistics, neurolinguistics, and second language acquisition.

Title: Processing attraction effects in advanced L2 learners and English native speakers. Download the recording.

Abstract: We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine whether late advanced second language (L2) learners can show native-like processing of attraction. The results revealed that L2 learners showed similar ERP patterns with native English speakers, in that ungrammatical verbs following singular attractors, relative to their grammatical counterparts, elicited a P600, whereas this positivity was replaced by a N400 when plural attractors intervened between the subject head nouns and the verbs. Subsequent individual analyses showed that both groups’ brain responses varied along a N400-P600 continuum, with the dominance of P600 effects in singular attractor condition and dominance of N400 effects in plural attractor condition. We proposed that these two ERP components represented two processing routes of agreement: the P600 indexed a combinatorial process which parsed morpho-syntactic features between agreement controllers and targets, while the N400 indexed a heuristic process which evaluated lexical associations between agreeing elements. Moreover, similar to native speakers, L2 learners also showed an asymmetrical pattern of attraction, in that plural attractors interfered with ungrammaticality at disagreeing verbs, but they did not cause any difficulty in processing grammatical sentences at agreeing verbs. The overall results revealed that late advanced L2 learners could show sensitivity to agreement attraction in a native-like manner.

About Us

Conference Organization Committee

Directors Prof. ZENG Yanyu, Dean of the College of Foreign Studies. Mark Turner, Director of the Center for Cognitive Science. Committee members: Prof. LIU Bai, Dr. CHEN Zhongping, Dr. ZENG Jiansong, Dr. QI Xingang, Dr. QIN Yong.

Hunan Normal University

Located in Changsha, a city of great historical and cultural interest, Hunan Normal University (HUNNU) is an institution of higher education listed in the national “211 Project” and the “Double Top-Class Project” constructed jointly by the Ministry of Education and Hunan Province. Founded in 1938 as National Normal College (NNC), it is one of the oldest normal universities in China. In the wave of university reforms in 1953, Hunan Normal College (HNC) was founded on the basis of NNC. In 1984, HNC was renamed HUNNU. Gloriously, it was admitted in 1996 into the “211 Project”—one of the “100 key universities to be promoted in the 21st century” by Chinese Ministry of Education. Since 2000, it has renewed itself by merging with Hunan Teachers’ College, Hunan College of Politics and Law and Hunan Medical College in succession.

HUNNU consists of 24 colleges and runs altogether 92 undergraduate disciplines, which fall into such 11 main categories as philosophy, economics, law, education, literature, history, science, technology, agriculture, medicine, management and art. It boasts such 6 National Key Disciplines as Ethics, English Language and Literature, Modern Chinese History, Developmental Biology, Theoretical Physics, Basic Mathematics, and 9 Key Disciplines sponsored by the 211 Project, and 22 provincial-level key disciplines rated in the 12th Five-Year Plan.

HUNNU has set up partnerships with 171 universities and institutions in 41 countries and regions to push forward personnel exchange and cooperation in teaching and scientific research. It has co-established Confucius Institutes at Kazan Federal University in Russia, Wonkwang University in South Korea and Southern Utah University in the U.S.

Over the 80 years, HUNNU has been developing steadily despite the warfare of WWII. The faculty, whichever generation they were, stuck to the motto “Be humane, benevolent, excellent and diligent”, and worked hard jointly for the prosperity today. In recent years, propelled by the “211 Project” and the “Double Top-Class Project”, HUNNU has achieved much in discipline development, student education, faculty construction, teaching research and social service in the satisfaction of more than Hunan’s needs in educational, economic and social development.

While going forward, HUNNU takes holistic education as the fundamental mission, and strives to be a key comprehensive university which, with great advantages in teacher training, is top-class in China and well known abroad.

College of Foreign Studies, 410081 36 Lushan Rd., Yuelu District, Changsha, China

Foreign Studies College of Hunan Normal University dates back to Dept. of Foreign Studies of National Normal College founded in 1938. The first dean was QIAN Zhongshu (1910-1998), a famous scholar of Western and Chinese culture. After him, LUO Kailan (1906-1988), LIU Zhongde (1914-2008) and other eminent scholars worked here in succession. Now it holds the first-level doctoral program of Foreign Language and Literature and a research station for post-doctors. Under the leadership of Prof. JIANG Hongxin, its discipline of English Language and Literature was evaluated as a national key discipline. In Sept. 2017, its discipline of Foreign Languages and Literatures was admitted into the national “World First-Class Discipline Construction Project”, being one of the 6 admitted disciplines of its type in China.

It consists of Dept. of English, Dept. of Translation Studies, Dept. of Russian, Dept. of Japanese, Dept. of Korean, Dept. of French and Dept. of Public English, and boasts such institutes as Hunan Center for International Cultural Communication, Hunan Center for Sino-Russian Cultural Exchanges, Center of American Studies, Center of Northeast Asian Studies, Center for Studies of British and Irish Literature, Center of Modern Foreign Language Teaching, Center of Cognitive Linguistic Studies, Center for Studies of British and American Poetry. It publishes Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures and a Chinese journal of the same name, and supports 3 Confucius Institutes abroad.

It has a faculty of 26 full professors, 44 assistant professors and dozens of lecturers, of whom 51 have got doctoral degrees, 2 are members of the Discipline Assessment Group under the State Council, 2 are state-level teaching masters, and 2 are awardees of the New Century Talent Program of Chinese Ministry of Education. It is a partner of over 30 universities in America, Britain, Japan, Russia and South Korea. Now it has over 40 doctoral candidates, over 600 graduate students, and over 1,200 full-time undergraduates. Adhering to the motto “international perspective, global sense, honesty, integrity and versatility”, Foreign Studies College aims to cultivate more versatile and innovative talents who are both physically and mentally healthy, both virtuous and learned and are adaptable to societal changes.

Red Hen Lab™

The International Distributed Little Red Hen Lab™ is a global big data science laboratory and cooperative for research into multimodal communication. Red Hen deploys the contributions of researchers from complementary fields, from AI and statistics to linguistics and political communication, to create rich datasets of parsed and intelligible multimodal communication and to develop tools to process these data and any other data susceptible to such analysis. Red Hen’s social organization and computational tools are designed for reliable and cumulative progress in a dynamic and extremely challenging field: the systematic understanding of the full complexity of human multimodal communication. The study of how human beings make meaning and interpret forms depends upon such collaboration.