Ward's research areas are at the intersection of spoken language and human-computer interaction. Current topics include the subtle non-lexical and prosodic signals that enable inference of a dialog partner's needs, intentions, and feelings at the sub-second level; techniques for modeling these phenomena; and applications of the models for more accurate speech recognition, for better audio search, for more responsive dialog systems, and for more efficient codecs. These projects apply multiple methods --- linguistic, statistical, systems-building, and experimental --- towards the goal of providing excellent user experiences.