Dr. Rick Nouwen
Dr. Rick Nouwen
Associate Professor
I am interested in the correspondence between language and meaning. I have a background in formal logic and artificial intelligence. My work uses both logic and computational models to explain how we communicate. Why are sentences we read or hear interpreted in the way they are? And why do we produce the sentences we do to convey specific thoughts to our audience? I am particularly interested in the challenge of figuring out how language users reason about each other’s goals and intentions, especially when users are being untruthful as is the case with irony and hyperbole. I also look at how that reasoning changes when other interlocutors are non-human, for instance when humans interact with artificial conversational agents.