Face to the visit.

This afternoon, I received a task that introducing our laboratory to some foreigners in English. When it was 3:10 this afternoon, the guests who were a couple, came to our laboratory. After some introduction by our associate dean, I began to introduce our laboratory to them. During the speech of our associate dean, the woman smiled with me. I felt her kindness.

Frankly speaking, before their visit I had prepared the English introduction for one hour. Firstly, I talked some about the research areas, IF, IE and NLP. Then I made some demo to them. At the beginning, I fell some nervous. About two minutes later, the couple and me sat down to chat. The man was very interested in the natural text understanding technology. When he looked the demo of Chinese sentence dependency parser, he asked some questions about the Chinese character word segmentation and said that was very different from English words. When I demoed the summarization system, he told some thing about his works about reading lots of information. Finally, he was interested in the Chinese character recognition system. He wrote a character that was a old symbol in Chinese. So this system could not recognize it. He was very interested in this character and said some history about this symbol.

Frankly speaking, I had not understood some sentences of them. But I could feel that their English was perfect. This was a nice chance for me practicing my speaking English.

Nice experience!