On May 30, the Research Center for Ageing, Language and Care at Tongji University hosted a lecture and roundtable on Corpus Construction for Special Populations, held on Tongji University’s Siping Campus. The keynote speaker was Prof. Brian MacWhinney, Teresa Heinz Professor of Cognitive Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. The event brought together experts to discuss issues related to corpora construction for special populations, data processing techniques, and language analysis tools.
A distinguished panel of invited scholars joined the roundtable discussion. The session was moderated by Prof. HUANG Lihe, Secretary-General of the Research Center for Ageing, Language and Care. Scholars and students from leading institutions including Fudan University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Tongji University, Southeast University, East China Normal University, East China University of Science and Technology, and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, participated in the event. Discussions centered on prominent resources such as the DementiaBank from the U.S., the Multimodal Corpus of Gerontic Discourse (MCGD) developed in China, and other major international databases in the field of aging and language research. The event fostered active academic exchange and promoted cross-institutional collaboration in the area of special population language research.
Prof. Brian MacWhinney is a globally recognized scholar in first and second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics. He is the creator of TalkBank, an pioneering open-access repository for language studies across 14 topics and 40 languages. The platform offers a standardized transcription format and a suite of analytical tools powered by NLP, ASR, ML, and AI. Its subproject, DementiaBank, is recognized as a critical international resource for research on language and aging.
