I am a corpus linguist, teaching at the Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan. I am a full-time faculty member in the Linguistics track.
I got into linguistics long time ago, when I was in my Pronunciation Class as a freshman in college. It was novel to me at that time that sounds could be organized in such a systematic way and how these categories had been effectively applied to the learning of human speech sounds. So I continued with my lingusitic studies ever since ( tribute to my mentor, Cherry Li).
Now I don't really work on the so-called traditional linguistics. Rather, most of my research revolves around the methodology of quantitative corpus linguistics. I am quite interested in the inter-relationship between language, interaction and cognition. A long-time question that I've been working on is how repeated or recurrent language use motivates the emergence of systematic linguistic structures, and how this usage-based view of language is connected to the computational modeling of language processing, language acquisition and learning, and the mental representation of the speakers.
I have published corpus-based works in several academic journals, such as Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, Journal of Phonetics, Language Learning, System, Language and Speech and continue to be active in research on a computational approach to language processing. Now I am also on the editorial board of Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, which has been a very important journal for me throughout my career. Relatedly, I have witnessed the paradigmatic shift, i.e., the quantitative and computational turn, in corpus linguistics in the past few decades, and also spent an enormous amount of time adjusting myself to this computational mainstream. I won't say it's easy but it is fun.
And, oh yes, I am a fan of and , the two artificial languages that revolutionize the way we process human languages .
Finally, a few things I do if I have extra time: , , , .
PhD in Computational Linguistics, 2006-2012
National Taiwan University & Academia Sinica (TGIP-CLCLP)
MA in Linguistics, 2003-2006
National Taiwan University
BA in English, 1999-2003
National Taiwan Normal University
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A Message to Prospective Graduates We regularly recruit first-year graduate students who are interested in corpus linguistics or computational text analytics. If you are considering working on relevant topics in these fields, please feel free to contact me via email (alvinchen@ntnu.edu.tw). To work on projects in these fields usually requires more inter-disciplinary domain-specific knowledge, such as statistics, programming, and some other text analytic skills. Therefore, it is always good to talk to me as early as possible in your master’s program, so that we can arrange a better schedule for both your course plan as well as thesis projects.
Invited Talks/Presentations Chen, Alvin Cheng-Hsien. 2023. “Corpus-based Distributional Data for Linguistic Generalization: Frequency and more?” University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. Feb 17. Chen, Alvin Cheng-Hsien. 2022. “Processing Advantage of Recurrent Multiword Combinations.” Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. September 7. (Online Talk via Webex). Chen, Alvin Cheng-Hsien. 2022. “Processing Chinese Corpus Data with R”. An Online Workshop, Invited by Professor Alex Wang On, Li, Department of Counselling and Psychology, Hong Kong Shue Yan University, April 26.
Funded by Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology