Crit Cremers, born in Tegelen, the Netherlands, in 1951. Ph.D. from Leiden University. Associate Professor of Linguistics at Leiden University.
Fellow (1 September 2008 – 30 June 2009)
DUTCH AS A COMPUTABLE LANGUAGE
I worked on a monograph with the title “From Form to Meaning and Back. Dutch as a Computational language”. It describes the linguistic and computational architecture of the Delilah parser and generator (text analysis machine) for Dutch, which was developed at the Department of Linguistics at Leiden University in 1995. My co-author Maarten Hijzelendoorn and I were able to complete the body of that monograph: chapters on the syntax, the semantics and the lexical structure of the system, each in relation to meaning driven parsing and generation. Among the fundamental and control features of the system discussed in the monograph are: the combinatory categorial grammar underlying the system; the multiplicity of logical forms produced in parsing and generation; fast and efficient retrieval of complex lexical graphs; the use of unification and the generation of Dutch sentence from pure logical input. Last but not least, the monographs explore the limits of computability.