CityU's Language Information Sciences Research Centre (LISRC) launched a Celebrity Roster for Chinese news media on the Web on 1 January 2001. Updated every fortnight, the Roster is an index of the top 25 most newsworthy celebrities who have appeared in the news media in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Beijing in the previous two weeks. It reflects geographical differences in terms of orientation in news reports, as well as the most recent hot topics in politics, economy, sports and entertainment in the three places. 

Over the past five years, the LISRC has been working on the Linguistics Variation in Chinese Speech Communities synchronous corpus, based on news media materials collected from Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Taiwan, Singapore and Macau. The size of the corpus now exceeds 60 million characters and is still expanding. In addition to the Celebrity Roster, the Centre has also compiled two other key indices: the Place Name Index and the Common Word Rank.

The launching of the Celebrity Roster on the Web is an integral part of the establishment of the Institute of Chinese Linguistics in CityU. The objective of the Institute is to integrate and coordinate available resources within the University and in Hong Kong for the enhancement of researches on Chinese language sciences.