Alex Lascarides

Alex Lascarides is Personal Chair in Semantics at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. Her research is in formal and computational semantics and pragmatics, focusing mainly on the interaction between discourse coherence and discourse interpretation. Together with her colleague Nicholas Asher, she developed the semantic framework Segemented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT). She has published work on many semantic phenomena, including tense and aspect, presuppositions,...See more

Alex Lascarides is Personal Chair in Semantics at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. Her research is in formal and computational semantics and pragmatics, focusing mainly on the interaction between discourse coherence and discourse interpretation. Together with her colleague Nicholas Asher, she developed the semantic framework Segemented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT). She has published work on many semantic phenomena, including tense and aspect, presuppositions, lexical semantics, indirect speech acts, the semantics of questions and requests, strategic conversation, agreement and denial, negotiation and persuasion, human-robot interaction, symbol grounding, intonation, and embodied conversation, including the meaning spontaneous hand gestures. More recently, her research has focused on non-linguistic phenomena in Artificial Intelligence, particularly on learning optimal strategies in complex games, and algorithms for adapting graphical representations of sequential decision problems when during the learning process the learner discovers unforeseen factors that are critical to success. Her Ph.D. in Cognitive Science is from the University of Edinburgh. She has co-authored a book on SDRT (published by Cambridge University Press), a textbook on Cognition and Communication (published by MIT Press), journal papers in Formal Semantics ( Linguistics and Philosophy , Journal of Semantics , Semantics and Pragmatics ), Philosophy ( Synthese , Review of Philosophy and Psychology , Journal of Logic, Language and Information ), Computational Linguistics ( Computational Linguistics , Natural Language Engineering ) and Artificial Intelligence ( Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research ), and papers in conferences such as ACL, COLING, EMNLP, IWCS, SEMDIAL, AAMAS, CoRL, UAI, ICML, and Intellysis. See less