January 2017 – December 2020: NT小句复合体模型的理论和应用研究 (The Study of Theory and Application of the NT Clause Complex Model) National Natural Science Foundation of China: Grant F020601.
April 2016 – April 2018: The development and application of the customized medical English corpus. Joint project with Xiaowen WANG; funded by the Science and Technology Project of Guangdong Province, China: Grant 2016A040403113.
January 2016 – December 2017: Developing a Methodology & Software for the Pragmatic Annotation and Analysis of Written Language; funded by Guangdong University of Foreign Studies.
July 2015 – December 2018: L2 Processing and Acquisition of English and Chinese Paradox Constructions; joint project with Hai XU (GDUFS); funded by the National Social Science Foundation of China (NSSFC): Grant 15BYY062.
July 2014 – July 2017: A Cross-linguistic Study of Conversational Repair; joint project with Lihong QUAN (GDUFS); funded by the National Social Science Foundation of China (NSSFC): Grant 14BYY149.
June 2012 – July 2015: Pragmatic Annotation of the Hong Kong Spoken Corpus of English (non-funded); joint project with Winnie Cheng & Martin Warren of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
May 2012 – Apr-2014: Improving the Automatic Speech-act Annotation of Unconstrained Dialogue Corpora.
May 2011 – April 2014: Diagnostic English Language Tracking Assessment (DELTA) Writing Project (Co-Investigator)
June 2011 – May 2012: Creating Corpus-Based Online Materials and Resources for GE 2 English Courses for Engineering & Other Technical Disciplines.
July 2010 – December 2012: Annotation & analysis of a corpus of call-centre data of Philippine call-centre agents, and comparison with data of British and American native speaker call-centre agents with regard to their interaction strategies (non-funded); joint project with Kingsley Bolton.
2002 – 2010: Development of the DART (Dialogue Annotation and Research Tool) and associated computer-based pragmatic analysis methodology; personal Habilitation project (non-funded).
January 2003 – February 2004: Developing a methodology for classifying image captions, based on their textual environment; funded through Inventum GmbH, Germany.
2001 – 2002: SPAAC (A Speech-Act Annotated Corpus of Dialogues) Project (EPSRC-funded); joint project with Geoffrey Leech.
1997 – 1998: Expert Advisory Group on Language Engineering Standards (EAGLES WP4) (EU-funded); joint project with Geoffrey Leech, Martine Grice, & Andrew Wilson.
1995 – 2001: A Corpus-Based Methodology for Comparing and Evaluating Native and Non-Native Speaker Accents (non-funded); PhD project (University of Lancaster)
In Planning
Pragmatic annotation of ICE corpora.