Weighted automata model quantitative aspects of systems like the consumption of resources during executions. Traditionally, the weights are assumed to form the algebraic structure of a semiring, but recently also other weight computations like average have been considered. Here, we investigate quantitative context-free languages over very general weight structures incorporating all semirings, a...

In this paper we will discuss how a good code generator can be built for (lazy) functional languages. Starting from Concurrent Clean, an experimental lazy functional programming language, code is generated for an intermediate abstract machine: the ABC machine. In this rst pass many well-known optimisation techniques are included. However, we will also present some new ideas in this area, like t...

Many readers will, when reading the title of this column, react with an immediate feeling of “Oh no – not another language!”. Many people feel that too many languages are already out there, and that new languages add to the problem, not to the solution. We are getting closer to reaching a Babel-like scenario, where everyone speaks a different language. (It is, by the way, interesting to note th...

Recently there has been a growing number of initiatives for annotating children’s data for a number of languages, with for instance, part-ofspeech (PoS) and syntactic information (Sagae et al., 2010; Buttery and Korhonen, 2007; Yang, 2010) and some of these are available as part of CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000). For resource rich languages like English these annotations can be further extended wit...

1. Preliminaries Dialectology as a scientific pursuit is interested in charting and accounting for the range and spread of similarities and differences—that is to say, variation—within languages, and where appropriate, across languages too. As such, dialectology and the study of dialects more generally intersect in several ways with Balkan linguistics, the study of the interactions among variou...

While computers are linguistic machines moving symbols around, Informatics is BY and FOR people. I claim here that the gap between Computer Languages and Human Languages is, as a matter of fact, filled by a wide spectrum of Software Languages. My point is that the notion of Software Language goes far beyond Programming Languages; just like Informatics is indeed much more than Computer Science. ...

While computers are linguistic machines moving symbols around, Informatics is BY and FOR people. I claim here that the gap between Computer Languages and Human Languages is, as a matter of fact, filled by a wide spectrum of Software Languages. My point is that the notion of Software Language goes far beyond Programming Languages; just like Informatics is indeed much more than Computer Science. ...

Language, as part of human expression, may be viewed in analogy with genetic expression. Evolution of language is a result of complex temporal and spatial processes where, if one could aggregate the processes, one may speak in terms of parent traits and the resultant descendent traits. Insights from the theory of non-linear dynamics indicate that the multitude of interactions amongst speakers w...