Mats Rooth is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Cornell and is the Director of the Computational Linguistics lab. Dr. Rooth does research in two areas, computational linguistics and natural language semantics. He has worked extensively on mixed symbolic/probabilistic models of syntax and the lexicon, on contrastive intonation (what is called focus), and on related phenomena such as ellipsis and presupposition. In addition to these, he is currently working on finite state optimality theory and web harvesting of intonational data.