PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Mats Rooth

Mats Rooth is a computational linguist whose work spans language semantics, statistical NLP, and machine learning for speech. He completed a PhD at UMass Amherst in 1985 with the dissertation Association with Focus and published A Theory of Focus Interpretation in 1992. By 1994, he had worked at CSLI/Stanford, AT&T Bell Labs, and the universities of Stuttgart and Tübingen; he led Stuttgart's theoretical computational linguistics chair from 1995 to 2001 and coauthored a 1999 paper on EM-based lexical induction. In 2026, he coauthored machine-learning research on prosodic minimal pairs. As of October 2026, he is a professor in Cornell's Department of Linguistics.

Works
75
Citations
5,571
h-index
15

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 27 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 1985

    Association with Focus

    He earns a PhD at UMass Amherst in 1985 with a dissertation titled "Association with Focus".

  2. 1992

    A theory of focus interpretation

    In 1992, he publishes A Theory of Focus Interpretation in Natural Language Semantics.

  3. By 1994

    Work at Stanford and Bell Labs

    By 1994, his career includes work at CSLI/Stanford, AT&T Bell Labs, and the universities of Stuttgart and Tübingen.

  4. 1995–2001

    Leading a Stuttgart chair

    From 1995 to 2001, he heads the Theoretical Computational Linguistics chair at Stuttgart's Institute for Natural Language Processing. In 1999, he coauthors a paper that uses EM-based clustering to induce slot annotations for subcategorization frames from parsed corpora.

  5. 2026

    Machine learning for prosody

    In 2026, he coauthors a paper with Sahya Lagisetty on machine-learning classification of prosodic minimal pairs for Speech Prosody.

  6. As of October 2026

    Professor at Cornell

    He is a professor in Cornell's Department of Linguistics. His research spans computational linguistics, natural language semantics, mixed symbolic and probabilistic models of syntax and the lexicon, focus, ellipsis, and presupposition.

Career

  1. NowCornell UniversityProfessor
  2. 1995–2001University of StuttgartHead of Theoretical Computational Linguistics

Education

  1. 1985University of Massachusetts AmherstPhD

From the biography.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. Mats Rooth's Preprints compling.cis.cornell.edu. Checked 27 October 2026.
  2. PhD Alumni | UMLAUT, the newsletter of UMass Linguistics websites.umass.edu. Checked 27 October 2026.
  3. Humanist Archives Vol. 8: Prelimiary Program: Applied NLP dhhumanist.org. Checked 27 October 2026.
  4. Theoretical Computational Linguistics (Rooth) ims.uni-stuttgart.de. Checked 27 October 2026.
  5. Inducing a Semantically Annotated Lexicon via EM-Based Clustering arxiv.org. Checked 27 October 2026.
  6. Mats Rooth linguistics.cornell.edu. Checked 27 October 2026.