By appointment, with Tuesdays, 1:30-3 pm, starting 2/12 especially reserved for meetings in MD245. To arrange a meeting, please send
email to my assistant (
) for an appointment.
Extra drop-in or appointment office hours for before study card day, spring 2012-13 in MD245:
Tuesday 1/29 9:00am-1:30pm
Wednesday 1/30 4:00-5:30pm
Thursday 1/31 1:00-3:00pm
Friday 2/1 3:30-5:00pm (study card day)
Office hours by text or video instant messaging are encouraged.
Email me for my
iChat-AV/AIM
contact information.
Listings of my publications, many available over the web are available
here. (For the record, my Erdös Number is
3 (Shieber » Rabin » Kleitman » Erdös)
tying a
former student.)
COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION
Professor Shieber studies communication: with humans
through natural languages, with computers through programming
languages, and with both through graphical languages.
How natural languages are structured to permit efficient communication
is a difficult and multi-faceted question, involving issues in
linguistics (the syntactic and semantic structure of natural
languages), theoretical computer science (the inherent complexity of
aspects of human language); computer systems (in connection with the
design and deployment of algorithms for natural-language analysis and
generation); psychology (human sentence processing and misprocessing);
and artificial intelligence (the encoding of general knowledge and its
application to the understanding of utterances).
To answer such difficult questions, Shieber synthesizes knowledge from
several of these fields. In work on the computational properties of
grammar formalisms, formal metalanguages for specifying the syntactic
and semantic structure of natural languages, he uses techniques from
theoretical computer science to analyze the expressivity and
computational effectiveness of the formalisms, and builds on
algorithms from the field of computer systems. (Such studies shed
light on computer languages as well as natural languages. For
example, they reveal some deep similarities between the grammar
formalisms proposed for natural languages and the static semantics of
programming languages.) In his research on psycholinguistics, a
simpler model of human misparsing of sentences was developed by
applying technology from the efficient parsing of programming
languages. Similarly, his research on semantics makes use of the
technology of higher-order logic to explicate the workings of
elliptical and quantificational constructions of natural language.
Professor Shieber also looks at problems in automated graphic design
with the aim of developing a more graphically articulate
computer. (As human beings have been using natural language for
perhaps many hundreds of thousands of years, but widespread use of
symbolic graphical languages dates from only the late 18th century,
graphical artifacts are quite a bit more conventional, providing some
basis for the expectation that building a graphically articulate
computer may be much more practical than building a linguistically
articulate one.) Many graphic-design problems -- for instance, the
automatic layout of network diagrams, and the automatic placement of
labels on maps -- are computationally
intractable. Good approximate solutions to such problems can however,
often be obtained by stochastic methods, and such methods are
increasingly becoming a large component of his research.