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Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen is a Swedish-born linguist and a leading figure in the systemic functional linguistics (SFL) school, having authored or co-authored more than 160 books, refereed journal articles, and papers in refereed conference proceedings, with contributions to three television programs. He is currently Distinguished Professor in the Department of Linguistics at University of International Business and Economics, Beijing, Distinguished Professor of Linguistics, in the School of Foreign Languages, Hunan University, Guest Professor at Beijing Science and Technology University, and Honorary Professor at the Australian National University. Before this, he was Chair Professor, Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and Professor in the Linguistics Department of Macquarie University. Professor Matthiessen has worked in areas as diverse as language typology, linguistics and computing, grammatical descriptions of various languages, grammar and discourse, healthcare communication studies, functional grammar for English-language teachers, text analysis and translation, multisemiotic studies, and the evolution of language. He has supervised over 40 research students.

Kazuhiro Teruya is the author of several systemic functional books: two volumes of description of Japanese, co-authored books on key terms in SFL and a complete guide to systemic functional linguistics, an introduction to SFL in Japanese (edited and co-authored) and an edited series of Matthiessen’s collected works. Previously he taught at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, PRC and at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He was also involved in the Language-based Intelligent Systems project at the Brain Science Institute, RIKEN, in Japan.

Dr Canzhong Wu is an independent scholar having formerly been Senior Lecturer with the Centre for Language in Social Life, in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University. His research interests include translation studies, systemic functional linguistics, corpus linguistics and computer-assisted learning and teaching. He has developed a range of computational tools for discourse analysis and corpus-based studies.