Roger Levy

University of California, San Diego

Roger Levy is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego. He received his B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Arizona, his MS in Anthropological Sciences from Stanford University and his PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University. He was a UK ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh prior to his current appointment at UCSD. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award, and is currently writing a graduate-level textbook, Probabilistic Models in the Study of Language. Levy's research focuses on theoretical and applied questions in the processing of natural language. Inherently, linguistic communication involves the resolution of uncertainty over a potentially unbounded set of possible signals and meanings. How can a fixed set of knowledge points and resources be deployed to manage this uncertainty? To address these questions Levy use a combination of computational modeling and psycholinguistic experimentation. This work furthers our understanding of the cognitive underpinnings of language processing, and helps us design models and algorithms that will allow machines to process human language.