Alumni Talk - From PolyU ENGL to Oxford Linguistics

This talk features my journey from the Department of English and Communication at PolyU to pursuing graduate studies and an academic career in Linguistics at the University of Oxford. As a linguist, my research ranges from documenting and examining newly crystallised Mandarin variety, to experimentally investigating the development of tone languages, to probing phonetic information in automatic speaker recognition systems and developing acoustic models for low-resource languages. In this non-academic talk, I will reflect on how curiosity, uncertainty, and social engagement have shaped my path and how I have come to find direction, meaning, and confidence in researching languages. I will also share how I adapt skills and perspectives gained from English studies and other PolyU experiences to a more research-intensive, theory-oriented environment, and discuss what I find most promising and exciting about linguistics in the era of AI.