Roger Levy

Roger Levy is Associate Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to his appointment at MIT, he was faculty in the Department of Linguistics at UC San Diego for nine and a half years. His research focuses on theoretical and applied questions in the processing and acquisition of natural language. Linguistic communication involves the resolution of uncertainty over a potentially unbounded set of possible signals and meanings. How can a fixed set of knowledge and resources be deployed to manage this uncertainty? And how is this knowledge acquired? To address these questions, Levy combines computational modeling, psycholinguistic experimentation, and analysis of large naturalistic language datasets. This work furthers our understanding of the cognitive underpinning of language processing and acquisition, and helps us design models and algorithms that will allow machines to process human language.