The IRLab grew out of the Information and Language Processing Systems (ILPS) group. From April 2004 until September 2020 ILPS was one of the sections of the Informatics Institute of the University of Amsterdam. Led by Maarten de Rijke, ILPS grew to become a large team, working on a diverse set of topics in the areas of information retrieval and language technology.

On September 1, 2020 ILPS stopped to exist and gave rise to two new teams within the Informatics Institute: the Information Retrieval lab, directed by Evangelos Kanoulas, and the Language Technology lab, directed by Christof Monz.

During its 16+ years in existence ILPS was home to a large number of very talented and creative people. We’re in the process of compiling a complete record of all former ILPS-ers. Stay tuned!