Alex Lascarides

I am a professor in the School of Informatics , University of Edinburgh.

I am currently Director of the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation (ILCC).

Check out our new CDT in Designing Responsible NLP, which has lots of PhD studentships available.
Deadline for applications: March 11th 2024

My research aims to model the semantics and pragmatics of communicative actions in conversation, mainly focussing on text and speech but also analysing non-verbal actions such as hand gestures. I have studied how humans communicate with each other, with software agents and with robots, and I have studied conversations where the participants' goals diverge (e.g., courtroom cross examination, negotiations over restricted resources and political debate), as well as cases where they align (e.g., tourist information, scheduling). My main focus in all this work is to use models of discourse coherence to constrain the inferential processes that underly generating and interpreting language and gesture.