wren romano

About Papers Teaching Software

Linguistically, I’m interested in morphologically rich languages, free word order, social/pragmatic aspects of meaning, and cognitively-plausible models of linguistic structure. Philosophically, I’m interested in the underlying concerns of philosophy-of-language, -logic, and -mind that arise when addressing the aforementioned linguistic problems. Mathematically, I’m interested in a broad range of topics in logic and programming language theory. I’m particularly interested in non-standard logics (e.g., modal, substructural, paraconsistant, quantum,…), subtle differences in the formulation of logical formalisms (e.g., explicit vs encoded co/inductive data types, additive vs multiplicative products in linear logic, iterators vs recursors, axiomatic vs local reasoning in modal logic), and the problems associated with variables (e.g., unification and pattern matching, generalized quantifiers, evaluation of open terms, the handling of names in mechanized proofs). Computationally, I’m interested in the design and optimization of NLP algorithms— especially lazy, online, and interactive algorithms and their implementation in the pure functional setting. Despite my calling them “NLP” algorithms, these algorithms often show up in compilers as well, and I am also interested in their applications in that context.

My current and previous projects are listed on the Software page.

Largely orthogonal to my primary research described above, I am also a scholar of gender/sexuality studies— including the linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy thereof. This research often crosses over into my activist work, which is discussed more fully on the About page.