The theory of formal languages is widely recognized as the backbone of theoretical computer science, originating from mathematics and generative linguistics, among others. As a foundational discipline, formal language theory concepts and techniques are present in a variety of theoretical and applied fields of contemporary research which are concerned with symbol manipulation: discrete mathematics, bioinformatics, natural language processing, pattern recognition, text retrieval, learning, cryptography, compression, etc. This volume presents the main results of some recent, quickly developing...

This volume is a collection of papers written by several researchers that have in common the use of bio-inspired models to approach formal and natural languages. The main goal of the volume is to promote interdisciplinarity among linguistics, biology and computation. The area of convergence between these three disciplines is giving rise to the emergence of new scientific paradigms that will have an epistemological, social and cultural impact.

The book is organized around three thematic areas. Every area relates two of the three main topics: language, computation and biology.

This...

Language is one of the most challenging issues that remain to be explained from the physiological and psychological points of view. As a complex system, its formal modelling and simulation present important difficulties. Models proposed up to now have not been able to give either a coherent explanation of natural language or a satisfactory computational model for the processing of natural language. To investigate natural language, we need to cross traditional academic boundaries in order to solve the different problems related to language.

This book is an attempt to connect and integrate...