This volume contains papers presented at the first international workshop onword equations and related topics held at the University of T}bingen in October 1990. Word equations, the central topic of this annual workshop, lieat the intersection of several important areas of computer science, suchas unification theory, combinatorics on words, list processing, and constraint logic programming. The workshop is a forum where researchers fromthese different domains may present and discuss results and ideas, thereby supporting interaction and cross-fertilization between theoretical questions and...

This Festschrift, in honour of Professor Franz Guenthner's sixtieth birthday, presented by some of his friends and colleagues, covers the whole area of automatic language processing, of which he is an eminent specialist. The topics covered range from the semantics of natural languages to predicate grammar, from local grammars to efficient finite-state techniques and from Internet search engines to the design of electronic dictionaries. They all bear tribute to Franz Guenthner's ambition to make computational lingusitics a truly experimental science.