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. I will not be taking on any new PhD students for the foreseeable future.
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.