Research Interests

The questions I address in my research are

• How do people understand what they read?
• How do authors' intentions emerge in the text?

... which two questions I consider to a large extent to be the same. I have pursued this study through three sets of research tasks:

1. The study of how topical structure and textual style is transmitted through markers in text. This I have done through a number of quantitative studies of text, usually evaluated in terms either of statistical hypothesis testing or in terms of usefulness for information retrieval tasks.
2. The study of how text is understood, assessed, and -- tentatively -- how it is trusted by its readers (in cooperation with my colleague Preben Hansen). This we have done through a number of user studies formulated as information access situations.
3. The study of how a data-oriented model of semantics can be built from analysis of text (in cooperation with my colleague Magnus Sahlgren). This we have done through a large number of quantitative studies of text using a novel framework first proposed by Pentti Kanerva; the results are evaluated in terms of their usefulness for information retrieval tasks.