Leiden University Centre for Digital Humanities
Crit Cremers
Senior University Lecturer, LUCL
Areas of Interest
computational linguistics, computational semantics, computational grammar, categorial grammar, formal syntax, formal semantics, formal logic, language modeling, computational modeling of language acquisition, logic programing
Current projects
DELILAH – the development of a grammar and meaning driven parser and generator for Dutch, engined by categorial grammar, lambda calculus and unification. The system produces and accepts full fledged formal semantic analyses for which a logic is defined and that are heteromorphic to the syntactic analyses. The system lives on a complex constructicon containing all grammatical specifications in a retrievable structure. Delilah is written in Prolog.
MODOMA (mother-daughter-machine) – the development of a laboratory model of language acquisition, in which an (infant) agent acquires a grammar of another (adult) agent’s language by pure exchange of unannotated utterances. The adult agent instantiates the Delilah language machine. The project focuses on the architecture of the learning algorithm. The model is casted in Java and R.
Biography
Crit Cremers wrote a dissertation on computing coordination by grammar (1993). Till 2016 he was an associate professor of computational linguistics and formal semantics at Leiden University. Together with Maarten Hijzelendoorn and many students, he developed the Delilah language machine. Actually, he is focusing on further improving the machine’s meaning driven generator. With Maarten Hijzelendoorn and Hilke Reckman he wrote Meaning versus Grammar. An Inquiry into the Computation of Meaning and the Incompleteness of Grammar (2014), which accounts for the linguistic and computational architecture of the Delilah system and reflects on the fundamental divergence of semantic entailment and combinatorial constituency. Together with David Shakouri he is working on a language learning device that models the acquisition of grammar. He wrote and writes on Dutch grammar, semantics and computational linguistics. Till his retirement in 2016 he lectured in formal semantics, computational linguistics, syntax, general linguistics and linguistic programming. He is a supervisor of PhD-dissertations on formal and descriptive grammar, computational semantics, processing and language learning.