Roni Katzir, Associate Professor at Tel Aviv University, will join ZAS as a fellow from July 2021 to September 2021. Roni Katzir received his PhD from MIT in 2008 and subsequently taught at Cornell University before joining the faculty at Tel Aviv University in 2010. He works both as a computational linguist, focusing primarily on the modeling of grammar learning, and as a theoretical linguist, focusing on alternative-sensitive processes in semantics and pragmatics. He heads Tel Aviv University’s Computational Linguistics Lab and its undergraduate program in computational linguistics.
The collaboration with the ZAS will center on two projects. The first project investigates the division of labor between anaphoricity and goal-oriented discourse considerations (specifically, questions and answers) in both free focus and association with focus. The second is a computational project concerning the building blocks of semantic denotations and how they affect lexicalization patterns in natural languages, focusing on the typology of logical operators.