Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Levy, Roger

Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Brain & Cognitive Sciences

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Email: rplevy@mit.edu

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About

Roger Levy joined the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 2016. Levy received his BS in mathematics from the University of Arizona in 1996, followed by a year as a Fulbright Fellow at the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Study, Taipei, Taiwan and a year as a research student in biological anthropology at the University of Tokyo. In 2005, he completed his doctoral work at Stanford University under the direction of Christopher Manning, and then spent a year as a UK Economic and Social Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh. Before his appointment at MIT he was faculty in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego. Levy's awards include the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Research

Roger Levy asks theoretical and applied questions about the processing and acquisition of natural language, with a focus on how linguistic communication resolves uncertainty over a potentially unbounded set of possible signals and meanings. Levy examines such problems as how a fixed set of knowledge and resources can be deployed to manage uncertainty and derive meaning from natural language, how the underlying knowledge that supports this processing is represented in the brain, how those representations support language production, and how those representations are acquired. Combining computational modeling of large data sets with psycholinguistic experimentation, Levy’s work furthers our understanding of the cognitive underpinning of language processing, and helps us design models and algorithms that will allow machines to process human language.

Publications

Christopher Potts, Daniel Lassiter, Roger Levy and Michael C. Frank. In press. Embedded Implicatures as Pragmatic Inferences under Compositional Lexical Uncertainty. Journal of Semantics.

Bożena Pająk, Sarah C. Creel and Roger Levy. In press. Difficulty in learning similar-sounding words: a developmental stage or a general property of learning?. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition.

Till Poppels and Roger Levy. 2015. Resolving quantity and informativeness implicature in indefinite reference. Proceedings of the 2015 Amsterdam Colloquium: The Workshop on Reasoning in Natural Language, pp. 313–322.

Justine T. Kao, Roger Levy and Noah D. Goodman. 2015. A Computational Model of Linguistic Humor in Puns. Cognitive Science.

Christopher Potts and Roger Levy. 2015. Negotiating Lexical Uncertainty and Speaker Expertise with Disjunction. Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society.

Emily Morgan and Roger Levy. 2015. Modeling idiosyncratic preferences: How generative knowledge and expression frequency jointly determine language structure. Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, pp. 1649–1654.

Mark Myslín and Roger Levy. 2015. Comprehension priming as rational expectation for repetition: Evidence from syntactic processing. Cognition 147:29–56.

Thomas Wasow, Roger Levy, Robin Melnick, Hanzhi Zhu and Tom Juzek. 2015. Processing, Prosody, and Optional to. In Frazier, Lyn and Gibson, Edward, editors. Explicit and Implicit Prosody in Sentence Processing (pp. 133–158). Springer.

Mark Myslín and Roger Levy. 2015. Codeswitching and predictability of meaning in discourse. Language 91(4):871–905.

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