Dr John Li has gained a PhD in linguistics at City University of Hong Kong. His research interest focuses on applied English linguistics, including corpus/computational linguistics, lexicography, computer-assisted language teaching and learning (CALL), second language acquisition (SLA), sociolinguistics, stylistics, discourse analysis and translation.

Dr Li has been teaching English and applied English linguistics in higher education since 2000. Before joining this institution, Dr Li had been teaching undergraduates and postgraduates applied English linguistic core courses at The Open University of Hong Kong, including Sociolinguistics, Stylistics, Discourse Analysis, Current Issues in Applied Linguistics and Methods in Applied Linguistics. In addition, he is an editorial board member of International Journal of Computational Linguistics (IJCL), and a reviewer for the journal of WORD by Taylor & Francis Group, the journal of Open Linguistics by De Gruyter and the journal of The Asia-Pacific Education Researcher by Springer. Furthermore, he is a member of the following academic societies: The Dialogue Systems Group at City University of Hong Kong, The Asian Association for Lexicography, Hong Kong Association for Applied Linguistics, The Lexicographical Society of China, and Special Interest Group on the Lexicon of the Association for Computational Linguistics.