ILLC News & Events

It is with deep sadness that we inform you that Theo Janssen died on December 6, after a long illness, at the age of 70. A trusted colleague, dedicated teacher and solid researcher passed away. Theo was connected to our university for almost

40 years before retiring in 2013. Interested in formal syntax and semantics since his student days, he worked in this field for all his life. Most of his work centers around the principle of compositionality, of which he was an eloquent and influential defender. Within the ILLC he was both feared and admired for his critical mind in all things, which we will miss greatly.

We are pleased to announce that Raquel Fernández has been awarded an ERC Consolidator, to work on Distributed dynamic representations for dialogue management (DREAM).

Our ability to communicate using language in conversation is considered the hallmark of human intelligence. Yet, while holding a dialogue is effortless for most of us, modelling this basic human skill by computational means has proven extremely difficult. Fernández will address this challenge by establishing a new computational model of a dialogue agent that can learn to take part in conversation directly from data about language use. Her model is grounded in linguistic theories of dialogue, but exploits recent advances in computational learning that allow the agent to learn the representations that it manipulates directly from experience. This constitutes a paradigm shift in dialogue modelling --- from predefined symbolic representations to automatic representation learning – that will break new scientific ground in (computational) linguistics, and artificial intelligence. Fernández will implement the agent as an artificial neural network system and train it with task-oriented conversations where the participants have a well-defined end goal. The agent will be able to integrate linguistic and perceptual information, leading to more human-like and effective communication.

As in the previous editions, the purpose of this meeting is to inform you about various issues that are currently of importance in the ILLC and / or the Master of Logic programme. All ILLC staff, PhD students and guests are invited to attend.

The meeting will be followed by Christmas drinks until 21:00. As usual, we would appreciate it if people would bring along some traditional food to accompany the Christmas drinks. The ILLC Office will hang up a form in the Common Room on which you can indicate what you intend to make. We look forward to some delicious international Christmas food!

Glenn Shafer is one of the founders of Game-Theoretic Probability, an alternative to Kolmogorov's measure-theoretic foundations for probability. In this lecture he will talk about new game-theoretic underpinnings for statistics.