
Dr Masayuki Hirata is a lecturer at the Center for Language Education at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He received his BA in Linguistics from Waseda University, his MA in Language Studies from Lancaster University, and his PhD in Corpus Linguistics from the City University of Hong Kong. His research interests span Corpus Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics, Stylistics, and Lexicography. He has presented papers on these topics at international conferences such as the International Conference on Meaning-Text Theory, the UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference, and the International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Dr Hirata has also worked as a bilingual lexicographer for Longman Dictionaries, where he contributed to building the first large-sized Japanese corpus (the Longman Japanese Corpus) and compiled the first bilingual-corpus-based English to Japanese lexicon (the Longman English-Japanese Dictionary). He has over 15 years of experience in teaching Japanese and English at the tertiary level in Japan and Hong Kong. Dr Hirata is passionate about exploring the connections between language education and the use of technology, and he aims to enhance his students' linguistic skills, intercultural competence, and individual learning.