Alex Lascarides

Alex Lascarides is a Professor of Semantics in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, holding the Chair in Semantics. He is affiliated with the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation and currently on sabbatical. His research focuses on the formal semantics and pragmatics of discourse and conversation, including gesture interpretation, strategic dialogue, and interactive task learning. He co-authored Logics of Conversation, a foundational text on Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT).

Research Interests:

• Theoretical Linguistics: Formal semantics/pragmatics, discourse coherence
• Natural Language Processing: Dialogue systems, gesture analysis
• Artificial Intelligence: Human-robot interaction, policy learning in complex games

Key Projects:

• TAS Governance Node (UKRI, 2021–2024) – Trustworthy Autonomous Systems
• SDRT – Ongoing work modeling discourse interpretation
• ROSIE Project (2001–2005) – Robust semantic interpretation in dialogue

Education: Doctorate in Linguistics/Computational Linguistics (not explicitly stated, inferred from career trajectory).

Labs/Teams: Leads research on discourse semantics and embodied interaction at the University of Edinburgh. Collaborates internationally on multimodal communication and AI ethics.