Mathematical Aspects of Natural and Formal Languages

This book contains original reviews by well-known workers in the field of mathematical linguistics and formal language theory, written in honour of Professor Solomon Marcus on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Some of the papers deal with contextual grammars, a class of generative devices introduced by Marcus, motivated by descriptive linguistics. Others are devoted to grammar systems, a very modern branch of formal language theory. Automata theory and the algebraic approach to computer science are other well-represented areas. While the contributions are mathematically oriented, practical issues such as cryptography, grammatical inference and natural language processing are also discussed. Contents:Substitutions on Words and LanguagesApplications to Cryptography (A Atanasiu)Grammar Systems: A Multi-Agent Framework for Natural Language Generation (E Csuhaj-Varjú)Normal Forms for Contextual Grammars (A Ehrenfeucht et al.)Control Mechanisms on #-Context-Free Array Grammars (R Freund)On Transitive Cofinal Automata (M Ito & M Katsura)Algebraic Foundations for Montague Grammars (H Jürgensen & K Tent)A Periodic Languages and Generalizations (J Kari & G Thierrin)Matrix Grammars Versus Parallel Communicating Grammar Systems (V Mihalache)Reducts Versus Reducing Operators (M Novotný)On Conditional Grammars and Conditional Petri Nets (F-L Tiplea)and other papers Readership: Computer scientists. keywords:Algebra;Array Grammar;Automaton;Chomsky Grammar;Combinatorics on Words;Cryptography;Grammar System;Marcus Grammar;Mereology;Montague Grammar;Natural Language;Petri Net