My area of research is natural language processing, with a focus on semantics and pragmatics. I investigate how the same combinations of words have different meanings in different contexts, in spoken or written language. This question is a particularly challenging object of study because we lack good models of context, its components, how it changes from moment to moment, and how it depends on language users. In 1985, I received my PhD in Linguistics from the University of Chicago, and I worked at many academic and industry research labs before joining the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Pennsylvania State University in 2016. My work is reported in over 120 publications in journals and refereed conference proceedings.