The Halliday Centre for Intelligent Applications of Language Studies (HCLS) bears the name of the world-renowned linguist, Professor Michael Halliday. It was officially launched in March 2006 in his presence at City University of Hong Kong. The Centre has the distinct honour of being named after this distinguished scholar, who for over half a century enriched the discipline of linguistics with his keen insight into language. His scholarship has advanced our understanding of language as a social phenomenon of meaning, the accurate and contextually appropriate processing of which lies right at the core of human communication and computer understanding of natural language. The Centre Director is Dr Alex Fang, Department of Linguistics and Translation, who succeeded Professor Jonathan Webster, the founding director of the Centre, on 1 July 2021.
