Carlos A. Gómez Gallo
Ph.D. Candidate
Departments of Computer Science and Linguistics
 
 




Fall 2008: I am currently TA’ing CSC 244/444 Logical Methods of Artificial Intelligence. My office hours are Thursdays 12:30-2:00pm, or by appointment. 





- Computer Science 
- Linguistics
- Brain and Cognitive Science Department. 
- Human Language Processing Lab
- Center for Language Studies
- Conversational Interaction and Spoken Dialogue Research Group
- Center for Computation and Brain




I have taught courses to high school students at Rochester Scholars Outreach Program, mentored students from underrepresented groups in the McNair Program at New Mexico State University. 

I also perform Cuban Salsa called ‘Casino’ at benefit concerts locally. 




Mailing Address:
734 Computer Studies Building
University of Rochester, 
Rochester, NY 14627

Telephone: 585-275-8479


Office: 626 Computer Studies Building.http://www.cs.rochester.edu/~cgomez/Teaching.htmlhttp://www.cs.rochester.eduhttp://www.ling.rochester.eduhttp://www.bcs.rochester.edu/http://www.hlp.rochester.eduhttp://www.bcs.rochester.edu/cls/people.htmlhttp://www.cs.rochester.edu/research/cisd/http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/ccb/shapeimage_1_link_0shapeimage_1_link_1shapeimage_1_link_2shapeimage_1_link_3shapeimage_1_link_4shapeimage_1_link_5shapeimage_1_link_6shapeimage_1_link_7
Introduction
 
I am currently doing a joint Ph.D. program in Computer Science and Linguistics at the University of Rochester.  I work in the departments of Computer Science with James Allen, Brain and Cognitive Science with T. Florian Jaeger, and Linguistics with Jeff Runner and Greg Carlson.
 
I am interested in how individuals interact as both speakers and addressees when engaged in a cooperative task (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 a speaker and a listener align such representations using dialogue.  In this context of language as action, I analyze utterances beyond the sentence boundary in naturally occurring dialogues both from an experimental and computational perspective, to investigate how speakers communicate using language and contextual knowledge mediated by cognitive aspects.  I address this question from both a comprehension and production perspective.  On the comprehension side, I ask: How do speakers interpret non-sentential utterances into larger semantic units?  What interfaces between syntax, semantics and pragmatics exist that allow interpretation to happen incrementally?  How can we model this process computationally?  On the production side, I ask: How do speakers plan their utterances incrementally?  What factors are speakers sensitive to when going from meaning to speech plan?
 
My work stems from my multidisciplinary background in Computer Science, Linguistics, and Brain and Cognitive Science.  Consequently, I use several methodologies to explore issues in task-oriented dialogues such as eye tracking on visual world experiments, corpus analysis, user-system usability surveys, and computational and mathematical models. These methodologies
can be broadly classified under computational psycholinguistics.  This emergent area of research contributes to the philosophy of language by providing tools to deal with the complexity of online understanding, production, and acquisition of language.  Furthermore, computational psycholinguistics provides both symbolic and probabilitistic models that help our understanding of linguistic representations and processing.  In this context, my Ph.D. dissertation focuses on developing a semantically annotated multimodal dialogue corpus, developing computational models for incremental language interpretation in dialogue systems, and developing mathematical models for incremental language production.
 
I was raised in Colombia, I started my university studies in sciences at Universidad de Los Andes.  After moving to New Mexico, I obtained a B.S. with Honors in Industrial Engineering and minor in Mathematics from New Mexico State University.  My interest in computational linguistics started when working at the Computing Research Laboratory.  I collaborated with Ron Zacharzki on developing a conversational agent called MARINA. This agent served as a language instruction companion and was based on finite state automata mechanisms.
 
At this point, I continued my studies on computational linguistics at the University of Sheffield NLP lab with Prof. Yorick Wilks, where I worked on the european funded project FASiL. The project consisted in the development of a multi-modal Virtual Personal Assistant which would ultimately manage user's personal information such as email, daily planner, and contacts. In this project, I implemented an email summarization tool which made use of threads, vestiges of previous email text appended to the current email, as a guiding factor for the summarization of the email topic.