Prof. Alex Lascarides - Discourse Coherence

Alex Lascarides, Professor of Semantics, presents her inaugural lecture entitled "Discourse Coherence".
Professor Lascarides' primary research focuses on modelling human communication, particularly on how the meaning of an utterance interacts with the interpreter's expectations that the speaker will organise discourse so as to highlight meaningful relationships among successive contributions.
She has spent the last 20 years developing formally precise models of discourse meaning, commonsense reasoning and agent behaviour so as to model this interaction. Recently she has focused on developing a computational model of non-verbal communication, particularly spontaneous and improvised hand gestures that occur in face to face conversation.