T. Florian Jaeger

University of Rochester

T. Florian Jaeger is the Wilmot Assistant Professor of the Sciences in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. He holds a PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University, and an MA in Linguistics and Computer Science from Humboldt University, Berlin. Jaeger's primary research interests are in information-theoretic and Bayesian models of language and language use, with a focus on communicatively efficient language production. Researchers in the HLP/Jaeger Lab investigate (1) to what extent language comprehension and production are organized to be robust and efficient; (2) whether and how lifelong linguistic adaptation may provide the plasticity necessary to efficiently communicate in different linguistic environments; (3) to what extent the lexicon and potentially even grammar reflect communicative as well as other processing pressures (e.g. memory limitations, similarity-based interference) and (4) to what extent such pressures bias acquisition. To address these questions, research in the lab employs behavioral paradigms (production experiments, eye-tracking, artificial language experiments) and corpus-based modeling that draws on methods from statistics, natural language processing and machine learning.