The focus of our research is language. Language is made up of words (man, dog) arranged in order (dog bites man doesn't mean man bites dog) and used in context (the meaning of you're a good dog depends greatly on who you are talking to!).
The importance of language to humans and to humanity is hard to understate and probably needs no defense here. Despite its great importance and a considerable amount of research -- particularly during the last century -- language is relatively poorly understood.
That is, although many of the basic facts are known, current theories are still fairly poor at predicting what a sentence means. The situation is somewhat like meteorology: though we know the basic pieces of the weather (storms, winds, etc.), predicting the weather for a given place on a given day remains dicey.
The research carried out on this website will not solve all the world's linguistic dilemmas, or even very many of them. But, with your help, we'll solve a few. To learn more about language, read the Games with Words blog. We also recommend The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker.