Interview with Huaxin Huang
Can you briefly introduce yourself?
My name is Huaxin HUANG, and I am a full professor of the institute of logic and cognition at Zhejiang University. My recent research focuses on the interdisciplinary areas of logic, language, and cognition. And I supervise graduate students in the topics of logic of language and cognitive pragmatics. A few years ago I had presided over and completed a Major Program of the National Social Science Fund of China, a cognitive study based on logical horizon.
What are the main research challenges you are working on now?
From the second half of last year, I am chairing another major project of the National Social Science Fund of China, the logical representation and cognitive computing of metaphors in Chinese. This project will take five years. And it involves the following five aspects: 1. To build a corpus of metaphors in Chinese for natural language processing; 2. To have hybrid inference models for computing metaphors in Chinese; 3. To analyze the generation and understanding of metaphors in Chinese in game theory; 4. To set up the argumentation-based reasoning system and semantic computing for metaphors in Chinese; 5. To achieve the algorithm implement and synthetic simulation for the cognition of metaphors in Chinese. I think that the study on metaphors is not only the key to solve the cognition issues in language, but also the main point to deeply understand the nature of human reasoning. The aim of our research is to solve the semantic ambiguity and its dynamic in the semantic level, and then to build semantic reasoning systems to have more powerful explanation ability by taking multi-agent interaction and pragmatic factors into consider.
What are in your opinion the main research challenges in AIs, robotics and reasoning?
Recently I pay more attention on the progress of existing work on language understanding and logical reasoning in AI. Especially due to the wide applications of deep learning and neural networks, many achievements have been made in the area of natural language understanding in the industrial area. I think the next challenge shall be the explainable issues in these models. And this could inspire the work in linguistics and logicians or other areas in related.
What is are favorite online resources?
The Chinese data bases I often use include CNKI, Wanfang Data, and Duxiu Data, while the English include IEEE, EBSCO, and Elsevier. I also use the CCL corpus of Pecking University and the BCC corpus of Beijing Language and Culture University. To check the corpus for metaphors, I use the VU Amsterdam Metaphor Corpus too. I like to check papers via https://arxiv.org/.
What are your aims outside of academia?
My hobbies outside of academics include reading novels and poetry. I usually take a walk every day, listen to music, and taste tea with friends. I am also very happy to give public lectures on logic and cognitive science.