Growing up, we have been learning and then losing various skills, but not all. One notable exception is the communication skill, challenged and developed time after time as we meet new people and start conversation with them. Modeling that skill from Computational Linguistics perspective is my overarching research agenda. Specifically, I am interested in dialog systems, computational models of discourse, dynamic meaning representations, and conversational corpus annotation. The real-life application I aim for is a conversational companion that provides language learners with personalized interactions to improve their communicative competence. I am co-advised by Prof. Sophia Malamud and Prof. Nianwen (Bert) Xue.