James F. Allen
Also known as James F Allen
James F. Allen studies language understanding, dialogue and reasoning about time, plans and human intentions. Allen received his doctorate from the University of Toronto in 1979. He held an assistant professorship at Rochester from 1979 to 1984, followed by an associate professorship and later a professorship. His research joined language understanding with reasoning and planning. Allen and collaborators published PLOW, a collaborative task learning agent. He received an outstanding paper award at AAAI in 2007. The project studied task learning through dialogue and demonstration.
- Works
- 328
- Citations
- 24,081
- h-index
- 56
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
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1979
Toronto to Rochester
Allen received his doctorate from the University of Toronto in 1979. He held an assistant professorship at Rochester from 1979 to 1984, followed by an associate professorship and later a professorship. His research joined language understanding with reasoning and planning.
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1980–1983
Intentions and time
With C. Raymond Perrault, Allen published work on analyzing intentions in utterances in 1980. In 1983 he published Maintaining Knowledge about Temporal Intervals. These contributions addressed representing plans, recognizing intentions and reasoning about actions over time.
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1987–1998
Books and dialogue systems
Allen published Natural Language Understanding in 1987 and Reasoning About Plans in 1991. With George Ferguson, he published the TRIPS intelligent problem-solving assistant in 1998. TRIPS joins language processing, context and collaborative problem solving in a dialogue system.
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2007
Learning a task through interaction
Allen and collaborators published PLOW, a collaborative task learning agent. He received an outstanding paper award at AAAI in 2007. The project studied task learning through dialogue and demonstration.
Sources and credits
Photo: www.cs.rochester.edu; James F. Allen profile photograph; creator not stated. License: Not stated by source. Source: cs.rochester.edu. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.