Research (Willem Zuidema)

Research

Research interests

evolution of language
language acquisition, grammar induction
population genetics, evolutionary game theory, artificial evolution
dynamical systems
machine learning
cognitive science
language variation and language change

Selected publications:

Willem Zuidema, Optimal Communication in a Noisy and Heterogeneous Environment, in: W. Banzhaf, T. Christaller, P. Dittrich, J. T. Kim, and J. Ziegler, editors, Advances in Artificial Life - Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL), Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 2801, pp. 553-563, Springer Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2003 (pdf manuscript and supplementary material)
Willem Zuidema and Gert Westermann, Evolution of an Optimal Lexicon under Constraints from Embodiment, Artificial Life, vol. 9, issue 4, pp 387-402, 2003. (pdf manuscript)
Willem Zuidema and Bart de Boer, How did we get from there to here in the evolution of language? Behavioral and Brain Sciences (in press for BBS issue 26(6), 2003) (Commentary on R. Jackendoff, Foundations of Language, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 2002). (pdf manuscript)
Nick Barton and Willem Zuidema, Evolution: The erratic path towards complexity, Current Biology, vol. 13, issue 16, pp. 649-651, 2003. (Commentary on R. Lenski, C. Ofria, R. Pennock, and C. Adami, The evolutionary origin of complex features, Nature, vol. 8, pp. 139-144, 2003). (pdf manuscript)
Andy Gardner and Willem Zuidema, Is evolvability involved in the origin of modular variation?, Evolution 57, Nr. 6, pp 1448-1450, 2003. (Commentary on Lipson, Pollack and Suh (2002), On the origin of modular variation, Evolution 56, pp. 1549-1556). (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) Supplementary material available soon!
Willem Zuidema, The importance of social learning in the evolution of cooperation and communication, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Vol. 25, issue 2, pp 283-284, 2002; Commentary on Howard Rachlin, Altruism and Selfishness, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Vol. 25, issue 2, pp. 239-250, 2002.
Willem Zuidema and Paulien Hogeweg, Selective advantages of syntactic language - a model study, in: Gleitman and Joshi (eds.), Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, USA, pp. 577 - 582, 2000. (postscript) (pdf) (all papers online at the Cogsci2000-website; buy the book at the publisher's page - Erlbaum)

Other publications and conference and workshop presentations

Joachim De Beule, Joris Van Looveren and Willem Zuidema, *From perception to language: grounding formal syntax in an almost real world, presented at the Belgium-Netherlands Artificial Intelligence Conference, October 21-22. 2002, Leuven, Belgium
Willem Zuidema, *Language adaptation helps language acquisition (2002), in: Bridget Hallam, Dario Floreano, John Hallam, Gillian Hayes and Jean-Arcady Meyer (Eds.), From Animals to Animats 7 (Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior, Edinburgh, August 4-9, 2002), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 417-418 (postscript) (pdf)
Willem Zuidema, *Language Adaptation helps Language Acquisition (2002), presented at International Workshop on Self-Organization and Evolution of Social Behaviour, September 8-13, Monte Verita, Switzerland; article in Proceedings
Willem Zuidema, *How the poverty of stimulus solves the poverty of stimulus (abstract [pdf]), presented at Evolution of Language 2002
Willem Zuidema, Language is different: the relevance of group, culture and computers in the evolution of syntax, presented at the OHLL Coevolution of Syntax and Semantics meeting, September 2001, Paris, France.
Willem Zuidema, *Emergent syntax: the unremitting value of computational modeling for understanding the origins of complex language (2001), in: Kelemen and Sosik (eds.), Advances in Artificial Life (Proceedings 6th European Conference on Artificial Life, Prague, September 10-14, 2001), Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol. 2159, Springer, Berlin, pp. 641-644, (postscript) (pdf) (all papers online at the ECAL2001-website ; buy the book at the publisher's page - Springer )
Willem Zuidema and Gert Westermann, *Towards formal models of embodiment and selforganization of language (presented at DECO-2001, Edinburgh, July 31st 2001); article in Proceedings
Willem Zuidema, Language evolution: establishing conventions and exploiting constraints (2000), presented at Bene-Evolang 2000
Willem Zuidema and Paulien Hogeweg, *Social patterns guide evolving grammars (2000) (postscript) (pdf) Presented at the Evolution of language 2000 conference; article in Proceedings
Willem Zuidema and Paulien Hogeweg, *Selective advantages of grammatical language, abstract (html) of presentation at Theory and Mathematics in Biology and Medicin 1999.
*peer-reviewed
Technical reports / thesis:

Willem Zuidema, Emergent syntax: the unremitting value of computational modeling for understanding the origins of complex language (2001), AI-MEMO 01-04, AI-Lab, VUB Brussels (postscript) (pdf) (long version of conference publication with the same title)
Willem Zuidema and Gert Westermann, On the Relevance of Language Evolution Models for Cognitive Science (2001), AI-MEMO 01-03, AI-Lab, VUB Brussels (postscript) (pdf) (long version of Zuidema and Westermann (2001), DECO)
Willem Hero Zuidema, Evolution of syntax in groups of agents (2000): Master's thesis, Theoretical Biology, Utrecht University
Willem Zuidema, Social patterns restrict evolving grammars (1999) -- appendix a -- appendix b (postscript): Internal report (stageverslag); appendix a contains the basic program code for the language evolution model used in other papers and the thesis above.
Willem Zuidema, Rule-learning in recurrent neural networks (1999) and appendix (program code) (postscript): class paper for "connectionism"

Reviewer (journals, conferences and workshops I have written reviews for)

DECO-2001 (Developmental Embodied Cognition Workshop)
RoboCup 2001 International Symposium
International Conference on Artificial Life*
International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior*
Artificial life Journal*
Bulletin of Mathematical Biology*
Artificial Intelligence*
*"Delegated" reviewer
Collaborators

Simon Kirby and Jim Hurford are my PhD supervisor at the Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit of the University of Edinburgh.
Nick Barton is 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 AI-Lab of the Vrije Universiteit Brussels. We are writing a paper for ESSLLI and a commentary for BBS.
Andy Gardner is 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 of my papers.
Gert Westermann was a colleague when I was at Sony CSL-Paris (France) and is co-author of one of my papers.
Joachim De Beule and Joris Van Looveren were colleagues at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Vrije Universiteit Brussels; so-far, we co-authored a technical report on grounding formal syntax (i.e. connecting natural language use with perception).

Funding

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.
from October 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

Current work (updated 7th of May 2003)
My ESSLLI and ECAL submissions have been accepted, so I'll be in Vienna in August and in Dortmund in September. The ESSLLI papers (one alone, one with Bart de Boer) still need a lot of work. I have designed a new algorithm for inducing (categorial) grammars from form--meaning pairs, based on reading about other grammar induction work such as Gerard Wolf's, Andreas Stolcke's, John Batali's, Rens Bod's and Menno van Zaanen's. I've started implementing parts of it in LISP and C++ (I should choose one soon). I hope to have a first (and final) report ready this summer. I'm attending a course in Evolutionary Genetics, and still discovering a lot of interesting work in evolutionary biology that is indirectly relevant for language evolution. I hope it will help me to phrase old and current work in a language that evolutionary biologists like, relate it to the relevant (and often very old) work in population genetics (e.g. Fisher, Wright, Price, Haldane, Maynard-smith) and write a nice thesis chapter on the "Evolutionary Biology of Human Language".