Dr. Lasha Abzianidze
Dr. Lasha Abzianidze
Assistant Professor
My research focuses on natural language reasoning, a problem that tries to teach computers to understand the relations between the meanings of natural language sentences. For example, if the sentence “the kid is playing football on the lawn” is true, we can conclude that “someone is playing on the grass” is true and further conclude that “the kid is sleeping in the bed” is false. Capturing such relations also covers accounting for paraphrases. While the same meaning can be phrased in several different ways in natural languages, computers find it difficult to see such paraphrases as semantically equivalent. In my research, I use methods that help computers not only recognize the semantic relations between sentences but also explain why it is so. Besides natural language reasoning, I have also been working on related topics such as syntax-semantic parsing, meaning representations, and semantic annotation.