Institute for Logic, Language and Computation

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The Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation (ILLC) is a research institute of the University of Amsterdam, in which researchers from the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Humanities collaborate.

ILLC's central research area is the study of fundamental principles of encoding, transmission and comprehension of information. Emphasis is on natural and formal languages, but other information carriers, such as images and music, are studied as well.

Research at ILLC is interdisciplinary, and aims at bringing together insights from various disciplines concerned with information and information processing, such as logic, mathematics, computer science, computational linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and philosophy.

In addition to its research activities, the ILLC is running the Graduate Programme in Logic (GPiL) with a PhD programme and the MSc in Logic, an international and interdisciplinary MSc degree in logic (GPiL webpage).

[edit] History

The ILLC started off in 1986 as ITLI, the Instituut voor Taal, Logica en Informatie (Institute for Language, Logic and Information). In the beginning, it was an informal association of staff members from the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science and the Faculty of Philosophy, and was joined by computational linguists from the Faculty of Humanities in 1989.

In 1991 the institute was officially established as a University Research Institute. During 1991–1996 the programming research group of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science was also part of the institute. The Applied Logic Lab (Faculty of Social Sciences) joined ILLC in 1996. Other groups in computer science and cognitive science have associated themselves with the institute in 1996.