My main area of research is Natural Language Processing. My research goals are providing methods and techniques for automatically understanding human languages (written and spoken).
Particular topics of interests are: applying methods from automated deduction (theorem proving and model building); the syntax-semantics interface; compiling unification grammars into speech recognition packages; semantic underspecification and ambiguity resolution; robust and wide-coverage semantic interpretation.
I am also interested in specific applications such as Question Answering, Recognising Textual Entailment, and Spoken Dialogue Systems. In particular I have worked on resources for building dialogue systems (DIPPER); dialogue systems for embodied agents, and on interfacing language technology with real mobile robots.
I have implemented various tools: the Boxer system for wide-coverage deep semantic analysis; the Nutcracker RTE system; the Uniance speech grammar compiler.