Mark Steedman's research interests cover issues in computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, computer science and cognitive science, including syntax and semantics of natural languages and programming languages, wide coverage parsing, comprehension of natural language discourse by humans and by machine, grammar-based language modelling, natural language generation, and intonation in spoken discourse.

Much of his current NLP research is addressed to probabilistic parsing and issues in spoken discourse and dialogue using the CCG grammar formalism, especially the semantics of intonation and the acquisition of language by child and machine.

He sometimes works with colleagues in computer animation using these theories to guide the graphical animation of speaking virtual or simulated autonomous human agents.  Some of his research concerns the analysis of music by humans and machines.

Mark Steedman has been Professor of Cognitive Science in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh since 1998.  Previously, he was Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, which he joined as Associate Professor in 1988 after teaching at the Universities of Warwick and Edinburgh.  His PhD is in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh.  He was an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin in 1980/81, and a Visiting Professor at Penn in 1986/87.

He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the British Academy, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the Association for Computational Linguistics and a Member of the European Academy.

Steedman has been principal investigator on recent grants on Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence from EPSRC and EU Frameworks 5 through 7, and currently holds an Advanced Fellowship award from the European Research Council (ERC).  He has graduated twenty-eight PhD students.