The Halliday Centre is motivated by Michael Halliday’s insight into language as a social phenomenon that creates meaning and enables communication. It aims to advance human knowledge about language and to apply such knowledge to emergent technologies such as artificial intelligence where language understanding represents a key issue.
More specifically, the Centre is a research lab in human speech and language as multi-modal communicative behaviour. Its research activities are fundamentally based on large corpora of empirical data as sources of linguistic knowledge. It aims to develop scientific models of written discourse and spoken interaction and adapt them to intelligent systems that handle, for example, man-machine dialogue, knowledge extraction, and machine translation. It also specialises in the development of reusable language resources and interoperable annotation schemes in support of linguistically informed solutions.
The Centre strives to collaborate with a widest possible range of research centres and projects both locally and internationally. It offers training for research students and language professionals.
