People

Jelle Zuidema

Willem Zuidema (a.k.a. Jelle) is associate professor of Computational Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) of the University of Amsterdam and research fellow of the national Language In Interaction consortium. Before joining ILLC in 2004, he worked at the University of Edinburgh (2002-2004), where he completed his PhD thesis on “The Major Transitions in the Evolution of Language”. He also worked at Sony Computer Science Laboratory - Paris (2000), the AI lab of the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels, (2000-2002), and in the Behavioural Biology group at Leiden University (2007-2008).

Erman Acar

Erman Acar is an assistant professor for XAI in Finance at ILLC and IvI. Prior to joining UvA, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning group at VU (2018 -2021) and in the Reinforcement Learning group at Leiden University (2021-2022). he did his PhD in Germany, University of Mannheim (2014-2017), and obtained a masters degree in Computational Logic from TU-Wien (Austria) and TU-Dresden (Germany) in 2012. During his career he made research visits to several institutions, including University of Bozen-Bolzano, University of Amsterdam, University of Calabria and University of Oxford. His research focuses on integrating machine learning with symbolically structured systems to extend their capacity in reasoning and explainability. See: sup-erman.github.io for further information.

Oskar van der Wal

Oskar van der Wal is a PhD candidate advised by Jelle Zuidema and Katrin Schulz. His research focuses on detecting social biases found in NLP models, such as gender bias and racism, and understanding how these biases are learnt from text. As part of the Bias Barometer project he investigates what these NLP models can teach us about our own biases and those in digital media.

Jaap Jumelet

Jaap Jumelet is a PhD candidate advised by Jelle Zuidema and Raquel Fernandez. The topic of his PhD is centered around the fields of NLP, interpretability, and linguistics. He is interested in gaining a better understanding of the current successes of the state of the art in NLP. His research is guided by hypotheses derived from linguistics, that he evaluates on deep neural models using techniques from the field of Explainable AI.

Charlotte Pouw

Charlotte is a PhD candidate in the InDeep consortium that is led by Jelle Zuidema. Her PhD focuses on interpretability approaches to speech models.

Marianne de Heer Kloots

Marianne de Heer Kloots is a PhD candidate within the Language in Interaction consortium. Her PhD focuses on the connection between language model representations and neural image data.

Frequent collaborators

Raquel Alhama

Raquel Alhama completed her PhD in our lab in 2017 with a focus on Artificial Grammar Learning. Today, she is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen.

Raquel Fernandez

Raquel Fernandez is an associate professor and the head of the Dialogue Modelling Group at the ILLC. She researches computational semantics and pragmatics with a special focus on linguistic interaction.

Ivan Titov

Ivan Titov is an associate professor at the University of Edinburgh and affiliated with the ILLC . His research focuses on Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning.

Tejaswini Deoskar

Tejaswini Deoskar is an assistant professor at Utrecht University, investigating probabilistic language models. In particular, she focuses on semi-supervised language learning techniques.

Henkjan Honing

Henkjan Honing leads the Music Cognition Group at the University of Amsterdam. His research aims to identify the cognitive and biological mechanisms underlying musicality, as well as the commonalities and differences in the processing of music and language.

Former members

Dieuwke Hupkes has a background in Physics, Logic and Computational Linguistics. In her PhD she works with artificial neural network models for semantic parsing. Despite the differences between artificial and biological neural networks, she hopes that investigating how artificial systems encode linguistic processes can help understanding how language is implemented in the brain.
Tom Lentz is a computational phonologist. He teaches in the bachelor programs 'Cognition, Language and Communication' and 'Artificial Intelligence'.
Lisa Beinborn completed her dissertation on educational natural language processing for language learning at the department of computer science in Darmstadt. She received her master’s degree in computational linguistics in Saarbrücken and her interdisciplinary profile has been further influenced by studies in Barcelona, Bolzano, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Trento. Her current research interests are focused on cognitively plausible language processing including multimodal and multilingual aspects.
Samira Abnar obtained her Master’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Tehran. Her main interest lies in the field of Cognitive Modeling. During her PhD, she investigates biologically plausible neural network models which simulate how humans learn and develop language.
Why do humans make music, and how do they do it? Why are we a musical species? These are the questions that motivate my research. I use computational methods to study how musical traditions differ. Mapping the diversity of musics across the globe, is a key step in understanding the cultural evolution of musics.
Lucia Liu is a student in the MSc Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
Marta Radzikowska is a student in the MSc Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
Peter Dekker studied Artificial Intelligence in Utrecht and Amsterdam. In his Master's thesis at the CLC lab, Peter investigated the possibilities to use neural networks to reconstruct the ancestry of languages. He worked as a software developer at the Dutch Language Institute, and is currently a PhD student in the AI lab of the Vrije Universiteit Brussels.
Matthijs Mul is a graduate student in Artificial Intelligence and Logic. For his master’s thesis he works on computational models that recognize logical relations between pairs of sentences.
Phong Le completed his PhD in our lab and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh, applying deep learning to natural language processing tasks.
Marieke Woensdregt is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. Using agent-based models, she explores the hypothesis that language and theory of mind have co-evolved.
Katja Abramova is a PhD student at Radboud University in Nijmegen, investigating human language evolution from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Vanessa Ferdinand works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, where she combines psychological experiments and computational modeling to examines cultural evolution.
Jonathan Mallison is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, working on automatic text generation, focusing on paraphrasing and sentence compression.
Frederico Sangati works as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh, focusing on Natural Language Processing, in particular on dependency and constituency parsing.
Willemijn Woerkum works as Data Scientist and Consumer Psychologist at bunq in Amsterdam.
Stijn wrote his master’s thesis in our lab and today works as Data Scientist at Xomnia in Amsterdam.
Kasper Kok completed a PhD at the Vrije University Amsterdam and now works as Data Scientists at Decos Information Solutions.