On April 9, 2026, Dr. Xi XU invited and chaired a lecture by Prof. Hui Haifeng (Dean, School of Foreign Languages, Huazhong University of Science and Technology; visiting scholar at UCLA and Stanford) titled "Emotion Recognition and Textual Representation in British Novels from a Digital Humanities Perspective."

    Prof. Hui presented a study of 87 British novels (1780–1830) using an automated emotion recognition pipeline built on the NRC Emotion Lexicon. The research quantified eight basic emotions across a large-scale corpus and conducted genre-level trend analysis, contrasting Gothic fiction and novels of manners through radar charts and heatmaps. The study demonstrated how digital humanities methods can surface emotional patterns—such as temporal shifts in anger, fear, and sadness—that are difficult to detect through traditional close reading alone. Future plans include expanding the corpus to cover 200 years of British fiction and building a diachronic lexical database incorporating word vector analysis.

    The Q&A session was chaired by Dr. Xi XU and saw active participation from Prof. John Corbett, Dr. Alice Wu, Dr. Malila, and students such as Xiyu Hu and Yumeng Li. Discussion centred on the reliability of AI-generated code, the limitations of the NRC lexicon for historical texts, and strategies for corpus expansion.

Screenshots from the Online Talk