A research project “Development and industrialisation of ‘Bilingual Trilingualism’-based retrieval and understanding platform on large scale social media” led by Prof. Wong Kam Fai has received the second-class award in Scientific and Technological Progress from the Ministry of Education (MoE). 

In collaboration with the Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen Graduate School, the University of International Relations, and the 54th Research Institute of China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, the team have jointly developed a ‘Bilingual Trilingualism’-based Retrieval and Understanding Platform on Large Scale Social Media. This platform is able to effectively retrieve targeted information from a complex web environment, which includes simplified and traditional Chinese, English, and Cantonese for Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan residents. The platform can also distinguish leaders and followers of a particular topic through the comments and forwarded messages of Weibo. Thus, the conversation will be identified and analysed more precisely, and the influential information will be extracted for topic summarisation. Novel technologies including deep learning, conditional random fields, and distributed cloud computing are adopted to provide services such as ‘Bilingual Trilingualism’-based social media information retrieval, multi-source and multi-dimension hot event evolution, cross-languages and cross-domains text analysis and summarisation, as well as sentiment analysis of the spread and evolution of topics on social media. These services will perfectly meet the needs of large scale ‘Bilingual Trilingualism’-based social media information retrieval and understanding, which are beneficial to the development of Internet information security and cross-border e-commerce related industries.

The research team included Prof. WONG Kam-fai, Associate Dean (External Affairs) of the Faculty of Engineering and Professor of the Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management (SEEM); Dr. Gabriel FUNG Pui-cheong and Mr. LI Bo from SEEM.

Two engineering projects from the Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management have received two Hong Kong ICT Awards 2018 including a Smart People Silver Award (Smart Inclusion) and a Student Innovation Award. 

Smart People Award (Smart Inclusion)

The Electronic Communication Book (E-Commu-Book), an application jointly developed by Prof. Helen Meng and her team from the Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management and the Stanley Ho Big Data Decision Analytics Research Centre, has won the Silver award in the Hong Kong ICT Awards 2018: Smart People Award (Smart Inclusion).  The E-Commu-Book is a means of Alternative and Augmentative Communication for users with speech disorders and communicative impairment.  The traditional, paper-version of the communication book is expensive to print and distribute.  It also has limited extensibility for new vocabulary items.  This motivates Prof. Meng’s team to develop the E-Commu-Book based on mobile device and cloud-based technology. 

The team built a multilingual version by integrating CUHK’s home-grown Cantonese speech synthesis technology, and cloud-based automatic text-to-speech synthesis and automatic text-to-text translation technologies.  At the same time, anonymous user’s usage patterns will be encrypted and stored in the cloud to inform further design improvement with Big Data Analytics technology.  The E-Commu-Book is has gained recognition from the international research community through invited and keynote talk, publications and demonstrations at flagship international conferences in Germany, Macau and US.   The project is collaborated with the Hong Kong Hospital Authority and is funded by the Innovation and Technology Fund’s Public Sector Trial Scheme.

Student Innovation Award

Mr. Bowen Chin, an undergraduate student from the SEEM department received the Student Innovation Award with his project titled Interactive Mobile Application to Assess and Detect Cognitive Impairment in Elderly Individuals.  It was his final year project supervised by Prof. Helen Meng.

The projetc automates the pen-and-paper cognitive assessments used by psychiatrists to assess elderly people for dementia via a mobile application, which employs an interactive user interface, speech recognizer, and natural language processing technologies.  This is an innovative approach to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the cognitive assessment process, which can then help early detection and diagnosis of dementia amongst the elderly population in an ageing society and help demented patient get early intervention and treatment.

Currently, most popular dining guides generally make recommendations according to the ratings by public users, thus the restaurants are usually famous ones or liked by most people.  The peer impact is not considered as an indicator for making a specific recommendation in existing dining guides.  However, people in reality tend to pick restaurants that are posted on social networks and recommended by peers.  Also, traditional dining review algorithms focus more on the individual consumer behaviours than on the community consuming pattern.  It is therefore a breakthrough for Prof. Wong’s team to better utilise social network resources to assist users in decision making.  By integrating data mining, translating function, and software application, they have designed this novel algorithm to collect and propose a more personalised search result and preferred dining recommendations for each different user, based on their social networks.  The results can also minimise the advertising impact or the information overload phenomenon. 

The recommendation system is easy to use.  It will run automatically once the app is downloaded with a linked account to social networks.  In principle, restaurants with more interactions and reviews on social networks will be prioritised higher than others. If users do not log into the system, they can still simply browse the popular restaurant chart and food trends for preliminary recommendations. 

In addition to the English and Chinese versions, the recommendation system is tailored to fit different language needs of the world’s travelers, specifically Japanese, Korean, French, Russian, and Spanish.  Foreigners can make use of the dining app to find good local food.  According to the 2017 visitor arrival statistics from the Hong Kong Tourism Board, there were over 1.23 million Japanese and 148,000 Russians visiting Hong Kong, which was a 12.6% and 3.8% rise, respectively compared to 2016, while Spanish is regarded as one of the official languages of the United Nations and has over 500 million speakers worldwide. The unique and multilingual function of INCOMIRS will help promote Hong Kong as a gourmet paradise with a great variety of creative culinary delights. 

People today are generally very fond of travelling. The research team is planning to develop another useful app for tourists to plan travel itineraries and generate more recommendations from other data which is also available on users’ social networks. For example, the numbers of photos on dining, shopping and sightseeing will be adopted in the system. ‘The recommendation system is a part of the CUHK’s smart innovation and technology products. We strive to transfer our knowledge and promote information technology research and application for the benefit of mankind,’ said Prof. Wong Kam Fai.