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The ILK research group is part
of the Tilburg centre for Cognition and Communication (the Creative Computing research programme) and the Department of
Communication and Information Sciences of the Faculty of Humanities
(Dutch name: Faculteit Geesteswetenschappen) of Tilburg University, The Netherlands.
ILK shares much of its history with,
and remains closely related to the Language Technology Research group of CLiPS (formerly CNTS, the Center for
Dutch Language and Speech) of the University of Antwerp, Belgium.
Originating partly from ILK research
are Textkernel, an
Amsterdam-based company developing tools for information extraction,
text understanding, and content management, and STIL, the
Foundation for Inductive Learning Applications, our consultancy and software license broker.
Research in ILK has mostly been funded by public
research funds. Our main sponsors are NWO, The Netherlands Organisation
for Scientific Research, and SenterNovem
(the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs).
Legacy ILK web pages
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A brief history
ILK, Induction of Linguistic
Knowledge, came into existence in the early nineties within the
Institute for Language and Artificial Intelligence (ITK) at Tilburg
University, when Walter
Daelemans enthused a group of students to work on the new
concept of applying recently developed machine learning algorithms to
problems in natural language processing. ILK got its name from the six-person 1995-2001
NWO/TSL project awarded to Walter Daelemans. Since then it
has continued to be the flag name of a string of projects in which inductive
learning algorithms are developed and employed in solving natural
language problems. The research was, and continues to be, intended to
be useful in two areas:
- Language Engineering. Provided there is material to learn
from, inductive learning techniques can bypass the knowledge
acquisition bottleneck that plagued computational linguistics before;
they are now widely employed across a wide range of NLP tasks,
producing generally accurate, robust, practical, language-independent
methods and systems.
- Linguistic and Cognitive Modelling. As a new method in
linguistic analysis, inductive learning allows us to discover
linguistic knowledge in corpora and dictionaries. They also provide a
new perspective on old philosophical and cognitive science problems
concerning the representation and acquisition of linguistic knowledge.
The book "Memory-Based Language Processing" (Daelemans and Van den
Bosch, 2005) documents the first fifteen years of work of
the Tilburg and Antwerp groups on applying memory-based classification
to natural language processing tasks.
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