Research
Research interests
- language acquisition, grammar induction
- evolution of language
- population genetics, evolutionary game theory, artificial evolution
- dynamical systems
- machine learning
- cognitive science
- language variation and language change
Publications
BioIn the past, I have worked in the Behavioural Biology group at Leiden University in the Netherlands (2007-2008), and the Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit and the Institute of Cell, Animal and Population Biology (now the Institute of Evolutionary Biology) of the University of Edinburgh (2002-2004) in Scotland, where I worked on a PhD thesis on "The Major Transitions in the Evolution of Language". Before that, I was a research assistant at the Artificial Intelligence Lab of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Brussels, Belgium (2000-2002), where I worked on the project "Origins of Language and Meaning", briefly at the Sony Computer Science Laboratory - Paris in France (2000), and in the Theoretical Biology group of the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands (1998-1999).
Popular press:
- Berthold van Maris, Hoe is taal ontstaan? Taalwetenschapper Jelle Zuidema over 'evolutionaire taalkunde', Onze Taal, Januari 2011
- Sander Becker, Theorieën over taal ontkracht (interview with Jelle Zuidema), Trouw 19/04/10
- Hanneloes Pen, interview with Jelle Zuidema, Parool, March 14, 2009
- Gideon Borensztajn, Jelle Zuidema and Rens Bod, Taalverwerving: De wetenschap van de kleine wetenschapper, Kunst en Wetenschap, 17,4:9-10, December 2008.
- Story in Didactief (October, 2008) concerning my paper with Borensztajn and Bod (2008).
- Story in Vrij Nederland (August, 2008) concerning my paper with Borensztajn and Bod (2008).
- Radio interview on Hoe?Zo! Radio (Radio 747AM, 24 January 2008).
- Edda Heinsman, Onderzoek uitgelicht: computationeel taalkundige Jelle Zuidema (in Dutch), Faculty of Science, University of Amsterdam, Dec. 2007
- Jelle Zuidema, De evolutie van taal (in Dutch), Blind! 12 (2 June 2007), special issue Evolutie-Revolutie
- Mathilde Jansen, Verschil tussen mens en dier is relatief, Kennislink, april 2007
- Jelle Zuidema, Neuraal netwerk gaat de beursvloer op, Intermediair, Juni 1997 pdf
- Jelle Zuidema, Luisteren naar koe en kip, Intermediair, April 1997 pdf; this article is cited in "B. Mombarg, Houden van kippen: een historisch-sociologische analyse van de georganiseerde raspluimveeteelt. Van Gorcum, 2001". How about that?
- Jelle Zuidema, De wedergeboorte van de Baby, Intermediair, Februari 1998 pdf
Selected publications:
- Van Heijningen, De Visser, Zuidema and Ten Cate, Discrimination of putative recursive syntactic structures by a songbird species (accepted for PNAS)
- Federico Sangati and Willem Zuidema, Unsupervised Methods for Head Assignments, Proceedings EACL 2009. pdf
- Willem Zuidema and Bart de Boer (2009), The evolution of combinatorial phonology. Journal of Phonetics Volume 37, Issue 2, April 2009, Pages 125-144 pdf
- Gideon Borensztajn, Willem Zuidema and Rens Bod (2009), Children's grammars grow more abstract with age - Evidence from an automatic procedure for identifying the productive units of language. TopiCS in Cognitive Science 1(1):175-188 pdf
- Willem Zuidema (2007), Parsimonious Data-Oriented Parsing, in: Proceedings of the 2007 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning (EMNLP-CoNLL 2007). pdf manuscript
- Willem Zuidema, How the poverty of the stimulus solves the poverty of the stimulus, in: Suzanna Becker, Sebastian Thrun, and Klaus Obermayer (eds.), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 15 (Proceedings of NIPS'02), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 51-58, 2003. (postscript) (pdf)
Research Students
- Raquel Alhama
- Phong Le
- Marieke Woensdregt
- Koen Klinkers
- Gideon Borensztajn: MSc Cognitive Science ("Automatic discovery of constructions in children's speech"); PhD December 2011 ("The Neural Basis of Structure in Language"); now postdoc at the UvA.
- Federico Sangati MSc Logic (thesis: "Towards simpler tree substitution grammars", December 2007); PhD January 2012 ("Decomposing and Regenerating Syntactic Trees"); now researcher in Edinburgh.
- Katja Abramova: MSc Brain & Cognitive Science (2011)
- Kasper Kok: MSc Brain & Cognitive Science (2011). Now PhD student at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
- Maarten Versteegh, MSc Logic (thesis: "iDOP:Iterated Data-Oriented Parsing as a Model for Diachronic Syntax",. August 2009). Now PhD student at Nijmegen.
- Vanessa Ferdinand: MSc Cognitive Science (thesis: "How learning biases and cultural transmission structure language: Iterated Learning in Bayesian agents and human subjects", August 2008). Now PhD student at Edinburgh.
Collaborators
- Carel ten Cate was project leader of the Bird Song meets Computational Linguistics project I worked on at Leiden University (2007-2008); we coauthored a paper on the topic.
- Rens Bod was project leader of the Unsupervised Stochastic Grammar Induction from Unlabeled Data project I worked on at the University of Amsterdam (2004-2007); we coauthored several papers, and cosupervise two PhD-projects.
- Kenny Smith was a colleague at the LEC in Edinburgh (now in Newcastle). We organized a workshop: LEFE05
- Tim O'Donnell was a colleague at the LEC in Edinburgh (now at Harvard). We presented a joint papers at Evolang'02 and Evolang'04, and are working on various projects at the intersection of formal language theory, language evolution and grammar induction that might, who knows, some day result in published papers.
- Simon Kirby and Jim Hurford were my PhD supervisors at the Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit of the University of Edinburgh.
- Nick Barton was my supervisor at the Institute of Cell, Animal and Population Biology of the University of Edinburgh, and co-author of a Dispatch for Current Biology (2003).
- Bart de Boer was a colleague at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (2000-2002) and again at the University of Amsterdam (2007-now). We coauthored several papers, including a paper in Journal of Phonetics on "the evolution of combinatorial phonology".
- Andy Gardner was a colleague at the Institute for Cell, Animal and Population Biology in Edinburgh. We wrote a comment for Evolution (2003).
- Paulien Hogeweg was the superviser for my master's research at the Department of Theoretical Biology of Utrecht University (the Netherlands), and is co-author of several papers.
- Gert Westermann was a colleague when I was at Sony CSL-Paris (now at Oxford-Brookes) and is co-author of a paper in Artificial Life.
- Joachim De Beule and Joris Van Looveren were colleagues at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Vrije Universiteit Brussels; we co-authored a technical report on grounding formal syntax (i.e. connecting natural language use with perception), and presented a paper at the BNAIC'02.
Funding
- October 2007 -- November 2011, VENI-fellowship from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO, Gebiedsbestuur Exacte Wetenschappen)
- October 2007 -- September 2008, Cognitie Pilot-project, from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO, Cognitie-programma)
- August 2004 -- July 2007: project grant of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO, Open Competitie, Gebiedsbestuur Exacte Wetenschappen) "Unsupervised Stochastic Grammar Induction from Unlabeled Data".
- January 2003 -- December 2003: Marie Curie fellowship from the European Commision at the Institute for Cell, Animal and Population Biology of the University of Edinburgh.
- October 2002 -- December 2002: Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds beurs.
- October 2000 -- September 2002: research assistantship, GOA grant "Origins of language and meaning" of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Flemish Government.
- February 2000 -- September 2000: research assistantship, Sony Computer Science Laboratory - Paris.