The Information and Language Processing Systems group is part of the Intelligent Systems Lab Amsterdam at the Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam. Our research is aimed at intelligent information access, especially in the face of massive amounts of information. Addressing this task requires synergy between information retrieval techniques, language technology, and effective methods for dealing with semi-structured information.
We combine fundamental, experimental and applied research, and we do so using a broad range of textual data, from the web, from enterprises, feed-based, edited, user generated, or obtained from (automatic) transcriptions of audio or video. We are involved with various projects with other groups, both within and outside the University of Amsterdam. Our research is funded by NWO, the EU and through a range of public-private partnerships.
Recent news
06 Feb 2012 : KNAW Computational Humanities Grant
Together with colleagues from the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Carribbean Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Maarten de Rijke has been awarded a KNAW Computational Humanities grant worth 681K Euro for a project entitled "Elite Network Shifts During Regime Change". The project aims to develop new techniques for detecting elites and their relationships from large archives of news media.
03 Feb 2012 : Two PhD Students for the “Semantic search in E-discovery”-project
The project is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Within the project, ISLA collaborates with the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, Fox-IT Forensics as well forensics and intelligence agencies. In e-discovery, digital information (e-mails, discussion forums) is mined to find answers to questions such as “Who knew what, at which time, and from whom?” Within the project, two PhD students will be employed.
03 Feb 2012 : NWO Free Competition Grant
Shimon Whiteson and Maarten de Rijke have been awarded an NWO Free Competition grant for a project entitled "Modeling and Learning from Implicit Feedback in Information Retrieval". The project aims to develop new machine learning methods for understanding implicit feedback, such as click behavior, obtained from users of social networking sites. This understanding will be leveraged to develop new reinforcement learning methods that optimize the performance of search engines for such social networking sites.
02 Feb 2012 : Center for Creation, Content and Technology (CCCT) Seminar
Friday, 17 February 2012, 16.00-17.00 (followed by drinks), Science Park, room A.104.
Under the CCCT umbrella, researchers from the humanities, the social and behavioral sciences, and the natural sciences collaborate in a multidisciplinary setting on information-rich research topics. CCCT is organizing a bi-monthly seminar in which one of the three faculties hosts speakers from the other two to report on research activities that are of shared interest.
09 Jan 2012 : Language engineering for online reputation management
LREC 2012 will feature a workshop on language engineering for online reputation management. The aim is to bring together the language engineering community with representatives from the online reputation management industry, with the goal of establishing a five-year roadmap on the topic plus a description of the language technologies required to get there in terms of resources, algorithms and applications. More details ...
