The focus of my research is on meaning and I attempt to understand the role of semantics in supporting intelligent inference and use this understanding to develop systems that learn and make intelligent inferences in complex domains. The target areas of application have been Natural Language Understanding and Intelligent Access to Textual Information.

Natural language semantics, as a theory of meaning, determines what are the meanings of words in a language and how to semantically combine elements of a language to build up complex meanings in context. Computational semantics, on the other hand, investigates the computational properties that (formal and cognitive) semantic theories need to have in order to be applicable to real-world problems. Moreover, it focuses on the development of both theoretical and computational models that together would describe correct and precise meanings for utterances in context. I am particularly interested in both semantics and pragmatics, the meaning of utterances determined compositionally (semantics), but most importantly the meaning of utterances resulting from the language use (pragmatics). And from here I am also focusing on social and cultural aspects of language use. Moreover, I am interested in human-generated data (i.e., games with a purpose) in various scenarios and for various purposes, and how to explore and model these data to build better inference systems.