He is interested in knowledge representation, commonsense reasoning, and natural language understanding, believing that "deep language understanding can only currently be achieved by significant hand-engineering of semantically-rich formalisms coupled with statistical preferences".
[3] Allen received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1979, under the supervision of C. Raymond Perrault,[4][5][6] after which he joined the faculty at Rochester.
[7][10] The TRIPS project is a long-term research to build generic technology for dialogue (both spoken and 'chat') systems, which includes natural language processing, collaborative problem solving, and dynamic context-sensitive language modeling.
[11] PLOW agent is a system that learns executable task models from a single collaborative learning session, which integrates wide AI technologies including deep natural language understanding, knowledge representation and reasoning, dialogue systems, planning/agent-based systems, and machine learning.
[13][14] He is also the co-author with Henry Kautz, Richard Pelavin, and Josh Tenenberg of Reasoning About Plans (Morgan Kaufmann, 1991).