Information Sciences and Technology

Heard on Campus: MIT professor Roger Levy on natural language processing

Roger Levy, associate professor of Brain and Cognitive Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spoke to students at the Natural Language Processing Colloquium, held Dec. 2 in the Cybertorium of the IST Building on Penn State's University Park campus. Credit: Erin Cassidy Hendrick / Penn StateCreative Commons

"Imagine you hear this: ‘I could really use a cup of coffee.’ Then you answer, ‘There’s a good place called Saint’s nearby.’ You’re able to understand a lot that was never said. You understood it was a question. The answer doesn’t say anything about coffee. But despite that, you understood it. All of these are not in the utterance but the exchange.

"How does human language achieve its unbounded, high-context dependent, expressive capacity? We are going to try to capture this in logical structures. This will allow us to connect insights about linguistic meaning from across cognitive science — linguistics, AI, cognitive psychology and psychology.”

— Roger Levy, associate professor of Brain and Cognitive Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, speaking at the Natural Language Processing Colloquium, held Dec. 2 in the Cybertorium of the IST Building on Penn State's University Park campus.

Last Updated December 2, 2016