Language Symposium 2025: Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) and Digital Genre Recap

 

On 8 February 2025, our department successfully hosted the Language Symposium 2025, inviting English majors from year 1 to year 4 and postgraduate students. The event took place in lecture room RLB 303 from 09:00 to 12:30 and featured a diverse range of presentations focusing on the intersection of generative AI, digital genres and language research.

 

The symposium began with an opening speech by Dr. Rebekah Bale, Acting Head of the department.

 

 

 

 

We were honoured to have Dr. Liu Kanglong, Associate Professor of Chinese and Bilingual Studies at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, deliver the keynote presentation titled “GenAI as a Translation Assistant? A Corpus-Based Study of Lexical and Syntactic Complexity in GPT-Post-Edited Learner Translations.”

 

  

 

 

 

Additional insightful presentations included:

 

“How Do Hotel Managers and GenAI Apologise Differently for Hotel Customers' Online Complaints?” by Dr. Jenny Wan

 

 

 “Asian Tourists and Shakespearean Heritage: What the Numbers Tell Us” by Dr. Rebekah Bale

 

 

“Translating Gender: Assessing ChatGPT's Chinese Translation of Marriage and Sexuality in The Second Sex” by Dr. Kacey Liu

 
 
We extend our special gratitude to Dr. Maria Chan for her coordination of the event. 
 
 
Active participants were awarded prizes for their contributions and engagement in the discussions.
 
 
The event highlighted the importance of GenAI in language research, and we are pleased that our students are increasingly aware of its significance. Some feedback from students include:
 
  • “GenAI is more developed in recent years; we need to learn from it.”
  • “I learned the analysis of AI translation, combined with a corpus-based approach, and the performance of Large Language Models like ChatGPT in translating and post-editing.”
  • “The ChatGPT-edited version exhibits greater clause length and a higher use of coordinate phrases per clause.”
  • “Excellent symposium. I learnt a lot! Thank you.”
 
 
We are very happy to see our students engaging in these critical discussions and exploring new avenues of research in the AI era. Thank you to everyone who contributed to the success of this symposium! We look forward to future events that continue to explore the exciting developments in AI, digital genre and language.