I am a member of the Computational Semantics Lab at CSLI, Stanford. I'm mostly involved with the CALO project (building a cognitive meeting assistant) and a NIST project building a conversational in-car dialogue system (called CHAT). My main interests within these projects are in computational pragmatics - using contextual information to aid interpretation and generation in dialogue systems.

Before CSLI, I was a member of the Logic, Language and Computation Group at King's College, London, where I completed my PhD under the supervision of Jonathan Ginzburg. We worked on ROSSINI, a project funded by EPSRC investigating the role of surface structural information in dialogue. In particular, we concentrated on clarification questions: how they should be interpreted, how they can be treated or used by a dialogue system, and what they tell us about semantics in general.

Before King's I took an MPhil in Computer Speech and Language Processing at the University of Cambridge. My MPhil thesis, entitled Simplistic Question Answering, investigated the use of sentence structure in a computer question-answering system.

Before that I worked for several years in the field of active noise & vibration control, mostly with Ultra Electronics Ltd. Noise & Vibration Systems and before that with Noise Cancellation Technologies.