News

The 6th Session of Zijin Salon Held Successfully 


date:2024-06-26

On the afternoon of June 20, the 6th session of Zijin Salon was held successfully at Rm. 201 of East Building 5. Prof. LI Ping from Hong Kong Polytechnic University was invited to the salon where he delivered a lecture titled “New Challenges in Language Research in the Digital Age: Brain, Language, and Computation” and then he had in-depth exchanges with teachers from different fields in the School of International Studies. Moderated by Prof. DONG Yanping, the lecture attracted over 50 students and teachers from various disciplines inside and outside the university.


In his lecture, Prof. LI started with the theme of the digital age and introduced the development of large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT. He summarized the iterative process of GenAI over the past decade, from predicting the next word to inputting large amounts of corpus and refining algorithm, emphasizing that the current era is truly a digital age, and “the future is now.”

Prof. LI highlighted that LLM requires massive data processing and lacks entities to interact with the environment. He suggested that researchers in linguistics, psychology, and other disciplines could understand the process of human brain language learningoptimize models to make them closer to human processing by studying model-brain alignment. Hthen shared a series of related studies of his team. He noted that AI model and brain alignment can occur at different levels, and there still remains much to explore in the future.

Prof. LI also discussed the new interactive teaching models in the digital age and introduced the cognitive neural mechanisms of foreign language vocabulary learning and its effects based on VR technology. He emphasized the importance of individual differences in multimodal and multimedia learning research in the current digital era.


Prof. LI presented cutting-edge topics and research findings from interdisciplinary fields such as linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, and computer science. The lecture was engaging, with students and teachers actively participating in the Q&A session, to which Professor LI responded with detailed answers. The room was filled with lively discussions on the past and future of GenAI and linguistic research. At last, Professor LI engaged in discussions with teachers from the fields of psycholinguistics, L2 acquisition, corpus research, and cognitive linguistics on specific research topics. The salon concluded amid warm applause.

School of International Studies, Zijin Society

Translated by JI Yan, proofread by XU Xueying


Contact Us

Address:No. 866, Yuhangtang Road, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, P.R. China

Postal Code:310058

Telephone:+86-571-8820-6044 +8

E-mail:wangjiayue@zju.edu.cn

ZJU-SISZJU-SIS Students