ILLC News & Events

The ILLC is looking to fill one postdoc position in Logic within the project EXPRESS: From the Expression of Disagreement to New Foundations for Expressivist Semantics. This is a five-year project funded by a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant and led by Dr Luca Incurvati (Principal Investigator). The project aims to develop a novel theory and logic of the way disagreement is expressed in dialogue. This theory will then be used to establish a novel approach to natural language semantics, inferential expressivism.

We are looking for an excellent researcher with proven expertise in Machine Learning for Natural Language Processing to join our team. We are particularly interested in candidates with expertise and experience in developing and applying deep neural networks and Bayesian inference to NLP tasks including machine translation, and syntactic and semantic parsing. Experience with and willingness to interact with research in information theory, cryptography, game theory, formal semantics, and/or cognitive science would be a plus.

The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) at the University of Amsterdam invites applications for a one-year research position at the postdoc level in the Dialogue Modelling Group led by Raquel Fernández. The mission of the group is to understand dialogical interaction by developing empirically-motivated formal and computational models that can be applied to various dialogue processing tasks and to human-machine interaction.

This position is part of a larger project on Asymmetry in Conversation, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) under the VIDI scheme. The exact research topic to be pursued by the successful applicant is flexible, but it must fit the general research agenda of the group, which is centred around computational semantics and pragmatics, in particular in interactive linguistic settings, including dialogue systems. The group has a wide international network of collaborators, both in academia and in industry research labs.

This talk will give a short introduction into computational social choice, an interdisciplinary field that lies at the interface between social choice theory and computer science. Afterwards the focus is on two different problems of collective decision making. The study of such problems is extremely important, since there are many situation where a collective decision based on individual preferences has to be made. The first part of this talk deals with the modeling of online participation processes and their properties. They will be formalized by abstract argumentation frameworks, where incompleteness is added to the initial model. This extension is more suitable to capture the dynamics of such processes. In this context the verification problem is particularly important, thus its computational complexity will be analyzed for different variants. The second part of the talk focuses on the algorithmic and axiomatic study of committee elections. Committee election rules for different forms of votes that try to minimize the voters’ dissatisfaction will be introduced. Afterwards its axiomatic and algorithmic properties are explored.

Modal logic provides an effective language for expressing
properties of state-based systems. When equipped with operators
that can test for infinite behaviour like looping and
reachability, the logic becomes a powerful tool for specifying
correctness of nonterminating, reactive processes such as
communication protocols and control systems. An elegant example
of such a logic is the modal mu-calculus which extends basic
modal logic by two quantifiers for defining inductive and
co-inductive operators. As well as being highly expressive, this
logic enjoys good computational properties (decidability, finite
model property, …) that distinguish it as a central logic in
computer science. In this talk I will introduce the modal
mu-calculus, present some key properties and discuss recent
results regarding its proof theory.