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Institute for Logic, Language and Computation

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    Maria Aloni receives ERC Advanced Grant

    We are pleased to announce that Maria Aloni has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant to work on the project Cognitive Biases in Reasoning and Interpretation.

    For more information, see https://erc.europa.eu/news-events/news/erc-2025-advanced-grants-results or contact Maria Aloni at .

  • Marieke Schouwstra wins an NWO Open Competition L

    The ILLC's Marieke Schouwstra and Eva van Lier (UvA/ACLC) have won the NWO Open Competition for their project You won the lottery… NOT! Evolution, comprehension and structure of languages with late negation. Read the abstract below.

    'Every human language employs a "negator" to express that something is not the case. Most languages place this negator before the verb; placing it afterward is relatively rare. Linguists theorize that negator-after-verb  is uncommon because it forces the brain to reinterpret a sentence’s meaning upon hearing the negator, though scientific proof for this claim is lacking. This project investigates late-negation languages using various methods, such as brain scanning of speakers of Cha’palaa, a late-negation language of Ecuador, and studying artificial language learning. By analyzing how humans process late negation, researchers aim to determine how cognition shapes language structure.'

    For more information, see https://www.nwo.nl/en/researchprogrammes/open-competition-ssh/granted-projects.
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    Théo Delemazure wins Dissertation Award of the French Association for AI

    We are proud to announce that Théo Delemazure, postdoc in the Computational Social Choice Group at the ILLC, won the 2026 Dissertation Award of the French Association for Artificial Intelligence (AFIA) for his PhD thesis defended at Université Paris Dauphine/PSL in 2025.

    Théo's thesis uses both mathematical and data-driven methods to show that making seemingly minor tweaks to how people's preferences are collected during voting in political elections can result in significant improvements regarding the fairness, representativeness, and efficiency of political decisions by better accounting for the complexities of actual voter preferences. During the first week of July, Théo presented his findings during a keynote address at the 19th French National Conference on AI (the Plate-Forme Intelligence Artificielle) in Arras, France. His thesis was earlier recognised as a runner-up for the prestigious Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award of the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.

    For more information, see https://afia.asso.fr/le-prix-de-these-afia/.

  • Makiko Sadakata wins the Humanities Education Award 2026

    The Master's course How Music Works: Inside the Musical Mind by Makiko Sadakata is the winner of the Humanities Education Award 2026. Congratulations!

    For more information, see https://medewerker.uva.nl/en/news/2026/winners-education-award-2026.

  • Dennis Ulmer awarded the honorable mention for a dissertation award

    Dennis Ulmer was awarded the honorable mention for the dissertation award from the Association for Computational Linguistic for his dissertation On Uncertainty In Natural Language Processing (you can read it here). Congratulations!

    For more information, see https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dennis-ulmer-604b86128_dont-spend-so-much-time-on-your-dissertation-ugcPost-7479979700304449538-UDHR/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAABX1-K0B9HlFIgOA9b23yIr5QYVMDJohxP8.

  • Makiko Sadakata wins an NWO Open Competition SSH XS

    Makiko Sadataka has won the NWO funding for her project Towards the Auditory Aesthetic Aha: exploring how our brain rewards discovering music in sounds. Congratulations! 

    Abstract
    Imagine a jumble of black-and-white patches that suddenly reveals a face and feels meaningful. Moments like this, when something confusing suddenly makes sense, are often surprisingly pleasurable. This project explores whether similar moments also occur when we listen to sound, for example, when repeated speech unexpectedly starts to sound like music. By studying these sudden shifts in perception, we aim to understand how insight shapes our enjoyment of sound and music, and how the brain transforms ambiguous information into meaningful and aesthetically rewarding experiences.

    For more information, see https://www.nwo.nl/en/researchprogrammes/open-competition-ssh/granted-projects.