Linguistics scholars from every corner of the world gathered at CityU between 1-3 February for the 15th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, and for the First International Conference on Modern Chinese Grammar for the New Millennium.

The 15th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, organized by the Language Information Sciences Research Centre, is an annual meeting of scholars in theoretical and computational linguistics from the Asia-Pacific region. The three-day conference covered all aspects of theoretical and computational linguistics, including morphology, phonology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, typology, corpus linguistics, formal grammar theory, natural language processing, natural language systems and related computer applications.

The First International Conference on Modern Chinese Grammar for the New Millennium (the Seventh Conference on Modern Chinese Grammar) was sponsored by the Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, the Chinese Language Society of Hong Kong, the East-China Normal University, the Linguistics Society of Hong Kong, Peking University, and the University of Hong Kong. Scholars and experts in Modern Chinese grammar from Asia, Europe, North America and Oceania discussed topics in syntax, morphology, and semantics of Modern Chinese, including comparisons with earlier stages of Chinese or other languages and studies of language acquisition related to the acquisition of grammar.