Research

I am active in a number of research areas in linguistics, computational linguistics and cognitive science. The main areas are:

• Ambiguity, including the study of underspecification and of cases of disagreement in interpretation, particularly with anaphora, especially in the DALI project.
• Anaphora, including the semantics of anaphoric expressions (e.g., in telescoping), anaphora resolution (e.g., the use of lexical knowledge in anaphora resolution), anaphoric annotation including with Games-with-a-Purpose such as Phrase Detectives, and the application of anaphora resolution e.g., in summarization;
• Crowdsourcing and Games-With-A-Purpose for annotation, in particular of anaphora, including work on Phrase Detectives;
• The use of evidence from brain data in computational linguistics;
• Dialogue semantics and interaction, including theoretical work on the semantics of dialogue phenomena such as completions, experimental work e.g., on attention, on gestures and on emotions, and applied work on developing spoken dialogue interfaces, e.g., for the iSpace at the University of Essex;
• Arabic NLP, in particular Arabic NER and Arabic social media.
• Text mining and its applications, including in particular deception detection and NLP to support human rights organizations and medical research.
• Annotation, in particular of anaphora, including the study of (dis)agreement in interpretation;
• The acquisition and representation of commonsense knowledge using evidence from corpora and from the brain;