I'm interested in language as a communicative and computational tool. People learn to understand and generate novel utterances from remarkably little data. Having learned language, we use it acquire new concepts and to structure our reasoning. Current machine learning techniques fall short of human abilities in both their capacity to learn language and learn from language about the rest of the world. My research aims to (1) understand the computational foundations of efficient language learning, and (2) build general-purpose intelligent systems that can communicate effectively with humans and learn from human guidance.