The Language Sciences have taken enormous strides forward over the past 20 years, leading to many practical applications with tremendous impact. Machine translation, speech recognition, and chatbots have radically transformed people’s everyday lives. However, while most applications developed to date have been driven by economic gain, the language sciences have a tremendous potential to yield societal gain as well, a potential that remains largely untapped, Roelofsen will argue. Within the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, Roelofsen and his colleagues pursue novel methods and applications from a human-centric perspective: methods that add transparency and are not restricted to mainstream languages, and applications for a more inclusive and safe society.

About Floris Roelofsen

Prof. Roelofsen received his doctorate at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation of the University of Amsterdam in 2008. After a visiting professorship at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst Prof Roelofsen became a postdoc at the ILLC where he has worked since. Prof. Roelofsen has been very successful in attaining grants, including personal grants: a Veni, Vidi, ERC StG and he is currently running an NWO Vici grant.

Currently, Floris Roelosen is PI of a large inter-faculty research project entitled Language Sciences for Social Good.

He has co-written one textbook on Inquisitive Semantics and has published  many articles in top-tier journals and conference proceedings and book chapters. He is associate editor of the Journal of Semantics.