Who am I?

I am Benjamin Keil, a linguist trained at UCLA and currently employed at Business Semantics. I am a dislocated Hoosier, both born in Indiana and educated at Indiana University. I am a brother to two philosophers and the son of two professors. I am a cyclist, a hiker, a reader, a traveler, and a cook. I did not start the fire. I am, on occasion, too sexy for my shirt. I ate the eye of the tiger.

What do I know?

My linguistic research has centered on issues of meaning and the relationship between meanings and the words and sentences we use to convey them. What is the nature of paraphrases? Can they truly have the same meaning, but just express it differently? Why is translation between languages so easy sometimes and so hard other times?

My Master's thesis developed an algebra of referent systems which combine associatively, exposing the power of linear order and morphology to make most syntactic structure irrelevant for the purpose of calculating the semantics of a sentence. Semantics seems to be not only compositional, but largely autonomous!

For my dissertation, I turned to the Cognitive Semantics of Leonard Talmy. He describes language use as a process in which speakers attempt to evoke particular experiential complexes in their listeners with their utterances. He gives the name Cognitive Representations (CRs) to these complexes. My dissertation developed a formal representation of CRs, and developed an algorithm for generating sentences intended to evoke a particular CR, potentially including several paraphrases.