Aaron Steven White

Aaron Steven White is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Rochester, with a secondary appointment in Computer Science and affiliation with the Goergen Institute for Data Science. He directs the Center for Language Sciences (CLS) and the Formal and Computational Semantics Lab (FACTS.lab). Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s Science of Learning Institute (2015-2017) and earned his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Maryland (2015).

His research focuses on computational semantics, investigating relationships between linguistic expressions and conceptual categories. Key projects include the MegaAttitude Project, analyzing predicate distributions and inferential properties, and the Decompositional Semantics Initiative (Decomp), which annotates corpora for semantic parsing and NLU systems. Recent work emphasizes integrating behavioral experiment data with corpus evidence to develop unified computational models.

He teaches courses on probabilistic dynamic semantics and has presented keynote talks on ontology-driven evaluation of summarization systems. His contributions span theoretical linguistics, NLP, and cognitive science.