Roger Levy

Roger Levy is a professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, where he heads the Computational Psycholinguistics Laboratory. 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 he combines computational modeling, psycholinguistic experimentation and analysis of large 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. Before coming to MIT, Levy was on the faculty at the University of California at San Diego. His awards include a Sloan Research Fellowship and an NSF Career Award. He earned a BS in mathematics at the University of Arizona, and a PhD at Stanford University.