Current research projects

These are the current research projects. You can also view the list of previous research projects.
  • Language Games voor het Taalonderwijs (IWT-SBO)
    This IWT project (SBO grant) aims at offering language learners a platform to optimize their knowledge of particular language system (e.g. Russian aspect, Spanish modality, etc.) through interactions with artificial agents in order to reach optimal communicative success and to improve the general cognitive capacities of the language learner. The existing language game platform that is typically used for agent - agent interactions, is been extended here to host human - agent communication.
  • Emergence and Evolution of Biological Symbol Systems (Complexity-NET)
    EvoSym is a collaborative European research project supported under the Complexity-NET 2009 pilot funding call, Interdisciplinary Challenges for Complexity Science. Complexity-NET is the European Network for the Coordination of Complexity Research and Training Activities.
  • Dynamic Speaker Alignment for Interactive Dialog Systems (IWT-SBO)
    The goal of this project is to develop and implement a cognitive model of linguistic alignment for interactive dialog. Building on computational models of priming, we will make use of Fluid Construction Grammar's bidirectionality which allows using the same representations for both parsing and production. The alignment model will be tested and evaluated based on a dialog system case study with FCG as its natural language processing frontend.
  • Digging for the Roots of Understanding (DRUST) (EU-ESF)
    The Collaborative Research Project DRUST brings together eminent European research groups that cover the full breadth of Cognitive Science (including cognitive anthropology, cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychiatry, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology) in an interdisciplinary examination of how different types of common ground support interpersonal and intercultural understanding. Communication plays a key role for such an understanding but only to the extent that dialog partners have sufficient common ground. Misunderstandings occur because most dimensions on which common ground can exist are not universally shared and not a priori present.
  • Advancing behavioral and cognitive understanding of speech (ABACUS) (ERC)
    This project investigates what cognitive mechanisms allow us to use combinatorial speech. Human speech is unique because it uses a small set of basic speech sounds to make an unlimited set of possible utterances. Thiscombinatorial structure allows us to make new words (such as “blog” or “app”) easily using speech sounds that we already know. Humans are the only apes that can do this, yet we do not know how our brains do it, nor do we know howexactlyour abilities are different from those of other apes. Using novel experimental techniques to investigate human behavior and novel computational techniques to model human cognition, it is the goal of this project to find out how we deal with combinatorial speech.