Abdulrahman Alsayed awarded Best conference paper prize

Congratulations to the School's postgraduate researcher, Abdulrahman Abdullatif A. Alsayed, who has been awarded the President's Prize for the best postgraduate research paper at the 49th International Conference of the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States (LACUS 2023). This recognition follows Abdulrahman's conference paper presentation on an innovative research project in which he explores the documentation of spoken language corpora using extended reality data. The project utilizes this data for a corpus-based study of the syntactic realization of information structure constructions that are sensitive to updates in the visual common ground within which language speakers are virtually embodied. This prize provides further support for Abdulrahman's doctoral work, which last year also received the Enrichment Scheme Award from the Alan Turing Institute, the United Kingdom's national institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science.

The paper can be seen in the upcoming issue of the LACUS Forum. For further work by Abdulrahman on the topic, an article which introduces the novel extended reality linguistic methodology employed in his research and offers a taxonomic overview of the utilization of extended reality in linguistic research in general, appears in the forthcoming Digital Modern Languages Special Issue of Modern Languages Open. The issue is published by Liverpool University Press with Open Access funding provided by King's College, University of London.