The grand challenges refer to the shared ambition of our time that is crucial to human future and requires both vision and concerted efforts to achieve. Although the list of the grand challenges proposed by different group are not identical, they do typically share core elements such as diversity, equality, inclusion, and sustainability. In this talk, based on several pioneering studies, I will show how careful analysis of language big data can help us understand the nature of such challenges, and how language big data can help to monitor the progress as well as to give recommendations of approaches to the grand challenges.

Garg, N., Schiebinger, L., Jurafsky, D., & Zou, J. (2018). Word embeddings quantify 100 years of gender and ethnic stereotypes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(16), E3635-E3644.

Huang, C.R., Dong, S., Yang, Y. & Han, R. (2021). From language to meteorology: kinesis in weather events and weather verbs across Sinitic languages. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 8, 4 https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-00682-w

Koenecke, A., Nam, A., Lake, E., Nudell, J., Quartey, M., Mengesha, Z., Toups, C., Rickford, J.R., Jurafsky, D. and Goel, S., (2020). Racial disparities in automated speech recognition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(14), pp.7684-7689.

Lei, S., Yang, R., & Huang, C. R. (2021). Emergent neologism: A study of an emerging meaning with competing forms based on the first six months of COVID-19. Lingua, 258, 103095

Sap, M., Gabriel, S., Qin, L., Jurafsky, D., Smith, N. A., & Choi, Y. (2020). Social Bias Frames: Reasoning about Social and Power Implications of Language. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 5477-5490).

Su, Q., Liu, P., Wei, W., Zhu, S., & Huang, C.R. (2021). Occupational gender segregation and gendered language in a language without gender: trends, variations, implications for social development in China. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 8, 133. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00799-6

Wang, S., Liu, R., & Huang, C. R. (2022). Social changes through the lens of language: A big data study of Chinese modal verbs. Plos one, 17(1), e0260210.

Wang, X., Ahrens, K., & Huang, C. R. (2022). The distance between illocution and perlocution: A tale of different pragmemes to call for social distancing in two cities. Intercultural Pragmatics, 19(1), 1-33.

Chu-Ren Huang is fascinated by what language can tell us about human cognition and we, individually and collectively, interact with natural and social environments. His recent books include Cambridge Handbook on Chinese Linguistics, Reference Grammar of Chinese and Student Grammar of Chinese from CUP, and Routledge Handbook on Chinese Applied Linguistics. His recent papers appear in Behavior Research Methods, Computational Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theories, Intercultural Pragmatics, Language Cognition and Neuroscience, Lingua, Language Resources and Evaluation, Lingua, Natural Language Engineering, PLoS One, among others.