Synchronous Formal Systems Based on Grammars and Transducers

This paper is an extended abstract of a doctoral thesis which studies synchronous formal systems based on grammars and transducers, investigating both theoretical properties and practical application perspectives. It introduces new concepts and definitions building upon the well-known principles of regulated rewriting and synchronization. An alternate approach to synchronization of context-free grammars is proposed, based on linked rules. This principle is extended to regulated grammars such as scattered context grammars and matrix grammars. Moreover, based on a similar principle, a new type of transducer called the rule-restricted transducer is introduced as a system consisting of a finite automaton and context-free grammar. New theoretical results regarding the generative and accepting power are presented. The last part of the thesis studies linguistically-oriented application perspectives, focusing on natural language translation. The main advantages of the new models are discussed and compared, using select case studies from Czech, English, and Japanese to illustrate.