Dr. Curt Burgess

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Cornell Juliano

Professor of Psychology
Cooperating Faculty in Computer Science
Faculty in the Neuroscience Program
Ph.D., University of Rochester, 1991.

In general, I am interested in all levels of ambiguity in language and how meaning can be represented at the cognitive, neural, and computational levels. Consequently, my research, which has been supported by the National Science Foundation, NIA, US Army, and the Digital Innovation Fund, explores the memory mechanisms that underlie language comprehension, the processing of semantic and syntactic ambiguity, as well as figurative language. From a neurolinguistic perspective, my work investigates the complementary roles of the two cerebral hemispheres in activating information in memory using both normal, computational and brain-damaged subject populations. Our recent applied research involves the application of computation proper names semantics and deception detection.

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I am involved in research in the following areas:

1) Psycholinguistics: Lexical representation of sense ambiguities and thematic roles; lexically based parsing; comprehension of figurative language; automaticity of processing emotional information.

2) Cognitive Neuroscience: developing models of cerebral asymmetries of memory and ambiguity processing, metaphor with normal and brain-damaged subjects.

3) Computational Cognition: our semantic memory model, (HAL) , that utilizes high-dimensional semantic space.