Alex Lascarides
I am a professor in the School of Informatics , University of Edinburgh.
I am affiliated with the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation.
I am currently on sabbatical.
Check out our new CDT in Designing Responsible NLP, which has lots of PhD studentships available.
Deadline for applications: some time in November 2024 (TBD)
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). I am particularly interested in Interactive Task Learning: that is, scenarios in which humans teach robots to master new skills and/or new domains. 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.