Building treebanks is a prerequisite for various experiments and research tasks in the area of NLP. Under a recently awarded grant, we are developing (i) a formal definition of a (dependency based) tree, and (ii) a midsize treebank based on this definition. The annotated corpus is designed to have three layers: morphosyntactic (linear) tagging, syntactic dependency annotation, and the tectogram...

Given an alphabet , a (directed) graph G whose edges are weighted and -labeled, and a formal language L , we consider the problem of finding a shortest (simple) path p in G complying with the additional constraint that l(p) 2 L. Here l(p) denotes the unique word given by concatenating the -labels of the edges along the path p. The main contributions of this paper include the following: 1. We sh...

We propose to model the development of language by a series of formal grammars, accounting for the linguistic capacity of children at the very early stages of mastering language. This approach provides a testbed for evaluating theories of language acquisition, in particular with respect to the extent to which innate, language-specific mechanisms must be assumed. Specifically, we focus on a sing...

The main focus of this paper is the characterization of generic musical structure in terms of the apparatus of formal language theory. It is argued that musical competence falls into the same class as natural language with respect to strong generative capacity – the class of mildly context-sensitive languages described by Joshi (1985).

Formal languages can be described by several means. A basic question is how succinctly can a descriptional system represent a formal language in comparison with other descriptional systems? What is the maximal size trade-off when changing from one system to another, and can it be achieved? Here, we select some recent trends in the descriptional complexity of formal languages and discuss the pro...

We introduce mCRL2, a specification language that can be used to specify and analyse the behaviour of distributed systems. This language is the successor of the μCRL specification language. The mCRL2 language extends a timed basic process algebra with the possibility to define and use abstract data types. The mCRL2 data language features predefined and higher-order data types. The process algeb...

When do we call a software development environment a composition environment? A composition environment must be built of three parts: i) a reusable component library, ii) a component framework determining the software architecture, and iii) an open and flexible composition language. Most of the effort in component technology was spent on the first two parts. Now it is crucial to address the las...

In formal language theory, we are mainly interested in the natural language computational aspects of ω-languages. Therefore in this respect it is convenient to consider fuzzy ω-languages. In this paper, we introduce two subclasses of fuzzy regular ω-languages called fuzzy n-local ω-languages and Buchi fuzzy n-local ω-languages, and give some closure properties for those subclasses. We define a ...

Formal knowledge modelling languages have a number of advantages over informal languages, such as their precise meaning and the possibility to derive properties through formal proofs. However, these formal languagesalso suffer from problems which limit their practical usefulness: they are often not expressive enough to deal with real world applications, formal models are complex and hard to rea...