On December 22, the Education Department of Shaanxi Provincial Government released the list of approved key laboratories in Shaanxi higher education institutions in the year 2023. The "Provincial Key Laboratory of AI-empowered Language & Culture Research" applied by the School of Foreign Studies (SFS) was approved for establishment, which will become one of the first batch of key laboratories of humanities in Shaanxi Province and the very first key laboratory of humanities in Xi’an Jiaotong University (XJTU).
This key laboratory, relying on SFS's discipline strengths of “foreign language and literature”, will be an important experimental platform to integrate scientific research, teaching and social services. It will emphasize interdisciplinary development, involving computer science and technology, clinical medicine, and other disciplines. Based on the interdisciplinary doctoral program of "Language and Cultural Systems", the laboratory is aimed at making breakthrough in three fields: language cognition mechanism, smart language education, and data-based innovation research of international communication and foreign discourse. It is intended to realize the mining, simulation, sharing, and analysis of language and cultural data through existing computer and AI technologies, so as to drive theoretical, institutional and practical innovation of the discipline, promote language and cultural research empowered by digital and AI technologies, language and cultural education, and foreign discourse system construction, leading the forefront development of foreign language disciplines towards informationization and digitalization.
The approval of this key laboratory marks a significant progress of SFS in research platform development, which also recognizes years of efforts of SFS in active exploration in the discipline of language and cultural systems. The SFS will take this opportunity to accelerate the building of this key laboratory by further integrating its academic resources, so as to better serve the local and national social and cultural development.
Written by: Li Zitan
Edited by: Chu Jianwei
