Figleaves are utterances that accompany blatantly bigoted statements in seemingly futile attempts to deny their bigotry (“I’m not racist but…”). According to a recent analysis (Saul, 2024), they are nevertheless accepted by some members of the audience, contributing to a growing tolerance of racist and sexist speech in public discourse. However, the exact mechanism underlying the reception of figleaved speech and its effects on people’s beliefs and attitudes is not fully understood yet. This project will be the first to fill in this gap by combining philosophical analysis with insights and methods from psychology of testimony.

When a computer talks to us, for example when answering a question, it must translate that answer from its inner computer representation to fluent human language. This project combines linguistics and state-of-the-art machine learning to create a language generation system in which the output text expresses exactly what the computer meant to say.

Discovering new quantum algorithms is more of an art than science. While typically one looks for a quantum algorithm that can solve a specific problem, this project focuses on creating general quantum subroutines. Just like Lego blocks, they can potentially be used to build many new quantum algorithms. Our main focus is on creating subroutines for problems with a very high degree of symmetry.

Although we tend to take our conversational abilities for granted, spontaneous dialogue requires a substantial amount of linguistic, cognitive, and social skills. Uncovering how these hidden skills manifest themselves in language is of crucial importance to be able to understand human communication, to help people communicate more effectively, and to build computer systems that successfully interact with people using natural language. This research programme will contribute to this fascinating challenge by specifically focusing on linguistic interaction in the presence of asymmetry, i.e., imbalances or mismatches between dialogue participants on three different dimensions: (i) linguistic abilities, as in child-adult dialogue; (ii) topical knowledge, as in interaction between experts and novices; and (iii) social roles, as in conversations between individuals with power differences. Looking into asymmetric settings provides a great opportunity for investigating the dynamic changes that linguistic interaction can potentially bring about -- how do our choices of words and phrases contribute to language learning, to knowledge transfer, or to opinion shifts? I will seek to answer such questions by exploiting theoretical insights from linguistics, psycholinguistics, and sociology and by applying sophisticated computational techniques to large amounts of data collected from real conversations. The proposed research programme thus falls within the area of Dialogue Modelling, a research field devoted to the study of linguistic interaction that lies at the interface of theoretical and computational linguistics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. The outcome of this research will be a comprehensive, unified, computational theory of asymmetric dialogue interaction that will feed back into all of these fields and lead to new cross-fertilisation. Besides being of great scientific significance, the knowledge generated is also of wider societal relevance as it can inform the practical design of computer systems that assist humans with a variety of tasks through interactive natural language interfaces.

In mainstream mathematics, non-finite notions of proofs are not considered as formal arguments in their own right, but merely as an intermediate machinery in formal investigations. Over time, however, they have proven to be an important alternative to finitary proofs and, in the last decade in particular, have helped break important barriers in our utilisation of recursion and co-recursion. These principles are ubiquitous in mathematics and computer science, lying at the core of mathematical proofs, computer algorithms and data structures. This project is about cyclic proofs, a subclass of non-finite proofs which, albeit infinitary, can be represented as finite graphs. The overarching goal is to provide a uniform theory for cyclic proof systems and I will approach the problem by investigating two computationally relevant extensions of modal logic: 1. Intuitionistic cycles. Design a robust logical framework for intuitionistic modal logic with fixed points, and develop general methods to establish fundamental properties such as decidability and algorithmic proof search. 2. Higher-type cycles. Establish a strong and succinct mathematical theory for model checking computation trees of higher-type functional programs. To carry out the investigation I will combine traditional methods from formal language theory (game and automata characterisations) with abstract formalisations provided by mathematical logic (sequent calculi, tableaux representa- tions, cyclic proof theory).