The semantics lab, headed by Kyle Rawlins, is a forum for research in semantics and related fields. It has physical space in Krieger Hall 105, including a testing room and a meeting room.

The semantics lab has regular weekly meetings during the semester, and somewhat less regularly at other times. These lab meetings provide a space for participants to discuss their research as well as others’, in semantics, pragmatics, syntax, and related fields. Some semesters these are structured more like a seminar, and some they are more like a traditional lab meeting. We often have co-run seminars with the Van Durme lab in CS.

If you’re interested in hearing about semantics lab-related events, you can request to join the semlab mailing list. This is primarily an announcement list, not a discussion list.

Current members

Semantics lab collaborators

This is a (non-exhaustive) list of collaborators and affiliated labs.

  • María Biezma is a Senior Lecturer in the department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at UMass Amherst; we have worked together on topics involving questions, especially polar and alternative questions.
  • Justin Bledin is an assistant professor in the JHU Philosophy department. He and I have worked together on a range of projects related to formal pragmatics and discourse.
  • Ben Van Durme in JHU Computer Science heads the research group on natural language understanding in CLSP. See the Decomp Project for much of our collaborative work.
  • Ilaria Frana is an Assistant Professor at the University of Enna “Kore”. Most recently we have worked on the semantics/pragmatics interface and discourse particles in Italian.
  • Barbara Landau heads the Language and Cognition Lab in Cognitive Science; we have worked together on topics in lexical semantics and at the semantics/conceptual interface, and have regularly co-advised PhD students in CogSci.
  • Aaron Steven White is an Assistant Professor in linguistics and director of the FACTS lab at Rochester. From 2015-2017 he was a postdoc at JHU. See the Decomp Project and the MegaAttitude Project for much of our collaborative work.

Past lab members

  • Najoung Kim, PhD 2021 (co-advised with Paul Smolensky, Tal Linzen). Currently a faculty fellow at the NYU Center for Data Science; from 2023-, assistant professor in Linguistics, Boston University.
  • Sadhwi Srinivas, PhD 2021. Currently a lecturer in JHU Cognitive Science.
  • Emory Davis, PhD 2019 (co-advised with Barbara Landau). Currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Education & Dept of Cognitive Science, JHU.
  • Karen Clothier, PhD 2019 (co-advised with Barbara Landau). Currently a senior analyst at Teltrium Solutions LLC.
  • Ioana Grosu, BA 2017 (undergrad RA). Now PhD student in the linguistics department at NYU.
  • Kristen Johannes, PhD 2015 (co-advised with Barbara Landau, Colin Wilson). Currently STEM Research Associate at WestEd.
  • Charley Beller, PhD 2013. Currently a Senior NLP Engineer at IBM.
  • Lilia Rissman, PhD 2013 (co-advised with Barbara Landau). Currently Research Associate at University of Wisconsin, Madison in Psychology.
  • Erin Zaroukian, PhD 2013. Currently a Cognitive Scientist in the Computational and Information Sciences Directorate at the U.S. Army Research Lab.
  • Monica Lopez-Gonzalez, PhD 2010 (co-advised with Geraldine Legendre). Founder of La Petite Noiseuse Productions, as well as a lecturer focusing on music cognition with a joint appointment in JHU’s Peabody school and the JHU Cognitive Science department.
  • Julian Grove, BA 2010 (undergrad RA). Recently finished a Ph.D in Linguistics at U Chicago, and is currently a postdoc at the Centre for Linguistic Theory and Studies in Probability at the University of Gothenburg.