Carlos Gallo

Post-Doc Fellow, Language Processing Laboratory

Carlos Gómez Gallo explores how individuals communicate in task-oriented dialogues. Important features of language emerge only when speakers have joint intentions and share a common visual ground. Not only can we study how listeners recover linguistic representations, but also to what degree speakers and listeners align such representations using dialogue. In this context of language as action, Carlos analyzes utterances beyond the sentence boundary in naturally occurring dialogues both from an experimental and computational perspective. Experimentally, he records human behavior during a task-based interaction to test hypothesis about how task complexity affects language. Computationally, he uses information theoretical principles to understand dialogue. Within this framework, he addresses questions such as: How do speakers translates a concept into an orderly stream of linguistic output? How does propositional complexity (in particular information content) affect the structure of the sentences in the discourse? If speech is incrementally assembled, how does a speaker plan their utterances?

He joins the Language Processing Laboratory (link to: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~herpro/) headed by Maria Polinsky (link to http://scholar.iq.harvard.edu/mpolinsky) to work as a postdoc in 2009. He obtained a M.Sc in Computer Science in 2005 at the University of Rochester and is soon to receive a Ph.D. in 2009 at the University of Rochester after amazing years of working with T. Florian Jaeger (link to: http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/fjaeger/) and the many people in the Rochester language community.