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CBS Students Triumph in 3rd FH Three Minute Thesis Competition

The Faculty hosted its 3rd Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) competition on 18 June 2025, showcasing the research prowess of our PhD students. The event challenged participants to present their complex research projects in just three minutes, emphasising clarity, conciseness, and effective communication. The winners are as follows: Champion: PENG Yingying (CBS) First runner-up: SRIVASTAVA Vasundhara (CBS) Second runner-up: LI Xinrui (ENGL) The 3MT Competition, developed by the University of Queensland, is an academic competition that challenges postgraduate students to present their research in just three minutes, using one slide. The competition aims to develop students’ communication and presentation skills, particularly in the area of research communication. The winner of the Faculty 3MT Competition will be joining the University’s 3MT Competition to be held on 2 July and we wish her every success.

20 Jun, 2025

News Faculty of Humanities

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Call for Nominations: Outstanding Alumni Award of PolyU Faculty of Humanities 2025

We are pleased to announce that the Faculty of Humanities(FH) is now calling for nominations for the Outstanding Alumni Award of PolyU Faculty of Humanities 2025. The award aims to give public recognition to FH graduates for their diverse accomplishments and contributions. Three specific areas of achievement would be given recognition, including: Professional Achievement Entrepreneurial Achievement Scholarly Achievement Outstanding Young Alumni Award Alumni who are aged at/under 40 in the award selection year would be eligible for the Outstanding Young Alumni Award. Eligibility The nominated candidate must be a graduate of the Faculty of Humanities* who has successfully completed a full-time or part-time programme offered by PolyU (or its forerunners: Hong Kong Government Trade School, Hong Kong Technical College, and Hong Kong Polytechnic) which led to academic award accredited by the respective Institution. The Outstanding PolyU Alumni Award has three levels, namely Department, Faculty and University levels. The nominees for the Faculty Award should be recipients of the Departmental Alumni Award or graduates of the Faculty level programmes, such as Doctor of Applied Language Sciences and BA(Hons) in Language Studies for the Professions. The proposer can be PolyU graduates, Honorary Graduates, University Fellows, PolyU staff, current PolyU Council and Court members and current Advisory Committee members. There is no limit to the number of nominations to be submitted by each proposer. However, the proposer cannot be the candidate himself/ herself. Faculty awardees of the current year may be nominated for the Outstanding Alumni Award at the University level. *including graduates from the former Faculty of Communication Nomination Deadline 25 July 2025 Award Details and Nomination Form Completed forms shall be sent to fh.events@polyu.edu.hk by the nomination deadline. Contact Us Email: fh.events@polyu.edu.hk Tel.: +852 3400 8212

20 Jun, 2025

News Faculty of Humanities

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Faculty Dean Prof. Li Ping Receives Gold Award in UBSN Best Paper Award 2025

Faculty Dean Prof. Li Ping has been awarded the Gold Award in the UBSN Best Paper Award 2025. His winning paper, titled “Onscreen presence of instructors in video lectures affects learners’ neural synchrony and visual attention during multimedia learning,” was published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The UBSN Best Paper Award recognises and honours UBSN users for their outstanding papers published in academic journals in the past year. The award aims to promote neuroscience research and help advance the quality of research conducted by UBSN PIs.

13 Jun, 2025

News Faculty of Humanities

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PolyU-led Research Reveals that Sensory and Motor Inputs Help Large Language Models Represent Complex Concepts

Can one truly understand what “flower” means without smelling a rose, touching a daisy or walking through a field of wildflowers? This question is at the core of a rich debate in philosophy and cognitive science. While embodied cognition theorists argue that physical, sensory experience is essential to concept formation, studies of the rapidly evolving large language models (LLMs) suggest that language alone can build deep, meaningful representations of the world. By exploring the similarities between LLMs and human representations, researchers at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) and their collaborators have shed new light on the extent to which language alone can shape the formation and learning of complex conceptual knowledge. Their findings also revealed how the use of sensory input for grounding or embodiment – connecting abstract with concrete concepts during learning – affects the ability of LLMs to understand complex concepts and form human-like representations. The study, in collaboration with scholars from Ohio State University, Princeton University and City University of New York, was recently published in Nature Human Behaviour. Led by Prof. Li Ping, Sin Wai Kin Foundation Professor in Humanities and Technology, Dean of the PolyU Faculty of Humanities and Associate Director of the PolyU-Hangzhou Technology and Innovation Research Institute, the research team selected conceptual word ratings produced by state-of-the-art LLMs, namely ChatGPT (GPT-3.5, GPT-4) and Google LLMs (PaLM and Gemini). They compared them with human-generated word ratings of around 4,500 words across non-sensorimotor (e.g., valence, concreteness, imageability), sensory (e.g., visual, olfactory, auditory) and motor domains (e.g., foot/leg, mouth/throat) from the highly reliable and validated Glasgow Norms and Lancaster Norms datasets. The research team first compared pairs of data from individual humans and individual LLM runs to discover the similarity between word ratings across each dimension in the three domains, using results from human-human pairs as the benchmark. This approach could, for instance, highlight to what extent humans and LLMs agree that certain concepts are more concrete than others. However, such analyses might overlook how multiple dimensions jointly contribute to the overall representation of a word. For example, the word pair “pasta” and “roses” might receive equally high olfactory ratings, but “pasta” is in fact more similar to “noodles” than to “roses” when considering appearance and taste. The team therefore conducted representational similarity analysis of each word as a vector along multiple attributes of non-sensorimotor, sensory and motor dimensions for a more complete comparison between humans and LLMs. The representational similarity analyses revealed that word representations produced by the LLMs were most similar to human representations in the non-sensorimotor domain, less similar for words in sensory domain and most dissimilar for words in motor domain. This highlights LLM limitations in fully capturing humans’ conceptual understanding. Non-sensorimotor concepts are understood well but LLMs fall short when representing concepts involving sensory information like visual appearance and taste, and body movement. Motor concepts, which are less described in language and rely heavily on embodied experiences, are even more challenging to LLMs than sensory concepts like colour, which can be learned from textual data. In light of the findings, the researchers examined whether grounding would improve the LLMs’ performance. They compared the performance of more grounded LLMs trained on both language and visual input (GPT-4, Gemini) with that of LLMs trained on language alone (GPT-3.5, PaLM). They discovered that the more grounded models incorporating visual input exhibited a much higher similarity with human representations. Prof. Li Ping said, “The availability of both LLMs trained on language alone and those trained on language and visual input, such as images and videos, provides a unique setting for research on how sensory input affects human conceptualisation. Our study exemplifies the potential benefits of multimodal learning, a human ability to simultaneously integrate information from multiple dimensions in the learning and formation of concepts and knowledge in general. Incorporating multimodal information processing in LLMs can potentially lead to a more human-like representation and more efficient human-like performance in LLMs in the future.” Interestingly, this finding is also consistent with those of previous human studies indicating the representational transfer. Humans acquire object-shape knowledge through both visual and tactile experiences, with seeing and touching objects activating the same regions in human brains. The researchers pointed out that – as in humans – multimodal LLMs may use multiple types of input to merge or transfer representations embedded in a continuous, high-dimensional space. Prof. Li added, “The smooth, continuous structure of embedding space in LLMs may underlie our observation that knowledge derived from one modality could transfer to other related modalities. This could explain why congenitally blind and normally sighted people can have similar representations in some areas. Current limits in LLMs are clear in this respect”. Ultimately, the researchers envision a future in which LLMs are equipped with grounded sensory input, for example, through humanoid robotics, allowing them to actively interpret the physical world and act accordingly. Prof. Li said, “These advances may enable LLMs to fully capture embodied representations that mirror the complexity and richness of human cognition, and a rose in LLM’s representation will then be indistinguishable from that of humans.”

10 Jun, 2025

News Faculty of Humanities

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PolyU and East China Normal University Co-organise International Workshop on Cross-linguistic Databases and Norms

The International Workshop on Cross-linguistic Databases and Norms was successfully held between 31 May and 1 June 2025 in Shanghai, bringing together over 100 scholars, students, and relevant stakeholders from leading institutions across the United States, Belgium, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau, and Mainland China. Jointly initiated by our Faculty Dean Prof. Li Ping and Prof. Cai Qing from the East China Normal University (ECNU), the Workshop aimed to explore fundamental questions in language and cognitive science and promote interdisciplinary research through collaboration in building and sharing cross-linguistic resources. This event was hosted by ECNU, co-organised by PolyU, the Language Specialty Committee of the Chinese Psychological Society, and the Shanghai Psychological Society. Keynote speakers from the University included Prof. Li Ping, who explored child language acquisition and large language models, highlighting advances in aligning AI models with human brain activity; and Prof. Brian MacWhinney, Visiting Chair Professor of Language Development and Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who showcased the latest development of the TalkBank platform—a global multilingual corpus he founded. Other keynote speakers included Prof. Uri Hasson from Princeton University, Prof. Marc Brysbaert from Ghent University, Prof. Bi Yanchao from Peking University, and Dr Tan Li-han from the Shenzhen Institute of Neuroscience. The Workshop made significant strides in advancing language resource development and interdisciplinary exchange, laying a strong foundation for future international collaboration in language and cognitive science.

6 Jun, 2025

News Faculty of Humanities

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Hong Kong’s Young Linguistic Talents Excel at the Asia Pacific Linguistics Olympiad (APLO) 2025

Among 465 contestants from 13 Asia Pacific countries/regions participated the Asia Pacific Linguistics Olympiad 2025 (APLO) held on 20 April 2025. They competed to solve problems on diverse languages, including Misantla Totonac, Looma, Tangsa, Mako, and Khasi. Among them, 15 participants were from Hong Kong’s local secondary schools. Eight contestants from Hong Kong were recognised among the top 72 by the International Jury. The team achieved an impressive 6th place among the 13 participating countries/regions, earning one gold, three silver, three bronze medals and one honourable mention. They are trained by and selected from the Hong Kong Linguistics Olympiad, which is organised by the Faculty of Humanities at PolyU. These eight students are Maxwell JI and Cici CAI from Chinese International School (ranks 1st and 72nd in the APLO respectively); Daniel LIN from Queen’s College (ranks 4th); Alex YEUNG from Carmel Pak U Secondary School (ranks 9th); Marcus CHIU from St. Joseph’s College (ranks 16th); Jayden KONG from St. Paul’s Co-educational College (ranks 30th); Theo LOMONE from Diocesan Boys’ School (ranks 57th); and Jenny CAO from German Swiss International School (ranks 59th). They will represent Hong Kong, China at the 22nd International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL), scheduled to be held from 21 July 2025 to 26 July 2025 in Taipei. Congratulations to all the awardees!

3 Jun, 2025

News Faculty of Humanities

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Exploring the Humanities: FH Launches New Podcast Series

We are thrilled to announce the launch of our new podcast series, "Exploring the Humanities: Voices from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (理大人文)"! Tune in as we showcase the groundbreaking and innovative work of our Faculty members, along with insights from distinguished speakers visiting the Faculty. Our episodes will explore humanities at the convergence of language, communication, history, culture, and technology. Stay tuned for inspiring conversations that highlight the dynamic and diverse research happening right here at PolyU FH. Subscribe now and be part of our journey.

30 May, 2025

News Faculty of Humanities

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JUPAS Consultation Day 2025

The PolyU JUPAS Consultation Day 2025 was concluded successfully on 24 May. This event provided an excellent opportunity for students and parents to learn about the undergraduate programmes offered by the Faculty of Humanities and explore their study options through our consultations and student-sharing sessions. They also engaged with academic staff and student ambassadors from FH departments, gaining a deeper understanding of the programme's unique features and programme details, as well as the learning experience. Learn more about PolyU's JUPAS programmes: https://www.polyu.edu.hk/study/ug/admissions/jupas

29 May, 2025

News Faculty of Humanities

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Dr Bruce Wang Receives the PolyU Young Innovative Researcher Award 2025

Dr Bruce Wang, Research Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Communication, has been awarded the Young Innovative Researcher Award (YIRA) 2025 by the University. The YIRA recognises outstanding young faculty members who have demonstrated originality, contributed to technological advancement, and propelled transformational innovation into solutions addressing global challenges through their research. This year’s YIRA saw a record-breaking 70 submissions from across all schools and faculties, with Dr Wang selected as one of the six awardees. His winning research proposal, titled “Tongue Skeletal Muscle Examination Using Ultrasonography as a Diagnostic Tool for Dysarthric Speech,” reflects the interdisciplinary innovation and practical impact that the award seeks to honour.

27 May, 2025

News Faculty of Humanities

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CBS Collaborates with Springer Nature to Publish Book Series on AI in Humanities

The Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies (CBS) of PolyU has forged an exciting partnership with global academic publisher Springer Nature. The collaboration was celebrated with a signing ceremony and forum on 12 May, featuring Prof. Li Ping, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Sin Wai Kin Foundation Professor in Humanities and Technology, and Ms Myriam Poort, Vice President of Humanities Publishing at Springer Nature, alongside faculty members and distinguished guests. United by a shared vision to explore generative AI’s transformative role in the humanities, this partnership reflects PolyU’s unwavering commitment to advancing research at the intersection of generative AI and the humanities, as well as highlighting CBS’s strategic position as a leader in driving language-focused innovation for the digital age. Two book series: Generative AI and the Humanities and SpringerBriefs in AI-Enhanced Language Research, will be launched under the collaboration, aiming to create a global platform for reimagining how GenAI can deepen our understanding of language, culture, and creativity.

19 May, 2025

News Faculty of Humanities

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