The contributors present the main results and techniques of their specialties in an easily accessible way accompanied with many references: historical, hints for complete proofs or solutions to exercises and directions for further research. This volume contains applications which have not appeared in any collection of this type. The book is a general source of information in computation theory, at the undergraduate and research level.

First studied in social insects like ants, indirect self-organizing interactions - known as "stigmergy" - occur when one individual modifies the environment and another subsequently responds to the new environment. The implications of self-organizing behavior extend to robotics and beyond. This book explores the application of stigmergy for a variety of optimization problems. The volume comprises 12 chapters including an introductory chapter conveying the fundamental definitions, inspirations and research challenges.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Language and Automata Theory and Applications, LATA 2012, held in A Coruña, Spain in March 2012. The 41 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited talks and 2 invited tutorials were carefully reviewed and selected from 114 initial submissions. The volume features contributions from both classical theory fields and application areas; e.g. innformatics, systems biology, language technology, artificial intelligence, etc. Among the topics covered are algebraic language theory, automata and logic, systems analysis, systems verifications, computational complexity, decidability, unification, graph transformations, language-based cryptography, and applications in data mining, computational learning, and pattern recognition.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Developments in Language Theory, DLT 2011, held in Milano, Italy, in July 2011. The 34 regular papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The volume also contains the papers or abstracts of 5 invited speakers, as well as a 2-page abstract for each of the 7 poster papers. The topics covered include grammars, acceptors and transducers for words, trees and graphs; algebraic theories of automata; codes; symbolic dynamics; algorithmic, combinatorial and algebraic properties of words and languages; decidability questions; applications of language theory, including: natural computing, image manipulation and compression, text algorithms, cryptography, concurrency, complexity theory and logic; cellular automata and multidimensional patterns; language theory aspects of quantum computing and bio-computing.

The problem of inducing, learning or inferring grammars has been studied for decades, but only in recent years has grammatical inference emerged as an independent field with connections to many scientific disciplines, including bio-informatics, computational linguistics and pattern recognition. This book meets the need for a comprehensive and unified summary of the basic techniques and results, suitable for researchers working in these various areas. In Part I, the objects of use for grammatical inference are studied in detail: strings and their topology, automata and grammars, whether probabilistic or not. Part II carefully explores the main questions in the field: What does learning mean? How can we associate complexity theory with learning? In Part III the author describes a number of techniques and algorithms that allow us to learn from text, from an informant, or through interaction with the environment. These concern automata, grammars, rewriting systems, pattern languages or transducers.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Algebraic Informatics, CAI 2009, held in Thessaloniki, Greece, in May 2009. The 16 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 25 submissions. The papers cover topics such as algebraic semantics on graph and trees, formal power series, syntactic objects, algebraic picture processing, finite and infinite computations, acceptors and transducers for strings, trees, graphs arrays, etc. decision problems, algebraic characterization of logical theories, process algebra, algebraic algorithms, algebraic coding theory, algebraic aspects of cryptography.

Ruslan Mitkov's highly successful Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics has been substantially revised and expanded in this second edition. Alongside updated accounts of the topics covered in the first edition, it includes 17 new chapters on subjects such as semantic role-labelling, text-to-speech synthesis, translation technology, opinion mining and sentiment analysis, and the application of Natural Language Processing in educational and biomedical contexts, among many others. The volume is divided into four parts that examine, respectively: the linguistic fundamentals of computational linguistics; the methods and resources used, such as statistical modelling, machine learning, and corpus annotation; key language processing tasks including text segmentation, anaphora resolution, and speech recognition; and the major applications of Natural Language Processing, from machine translation to author profiling. The book will be an essential reference for researchers and students in computational linguistics and Natural Language Processing, as well as those working in related industries.

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 volume stands out from existing publications because of its interdisciplinary nature. There has been a long tradition of interchanging methods among the aforementioned three disciplines, but it is difficult to find a single volume where this interchange of methods is shown. The volume includes chapters that clearly illustrate these interdisciplinary approaches and their benefits. This book will be of value to specialists who work in linguistics, biology or computation, and have interest in using methods from other disciplines that can provide new ideas, new tools and new formalisms to approach their problems, and that can help in the improvement of their theories and models.

This book focuses on modelling and simulation, control and optimization, signal processing, and forecasting in selected nonlinear dynamical systems, presenting both literature reviews and novel concepts. It develops analytical or numerical approaches, which are simple to use, robust, stable, flexible and universally applicable to the analysis of complex nonlinear dynamical systems. As such it addresses key challenges are addressed, e.g. efficient handling of time-varying dynamics, efficient design, faster numerical computations, robustness, stability and convergence of algorithms. The book provides a series of contributions discussing either the design or analysis of complex systems in sciences and engineering, and the concepts developed involve nonlinear dynamics, synchronization, optimization, machine learning, and forecasting. Both theoretical and practical aspects of diverse areas are investigated, specifically neurocomputing, transportation engineering, theoretical electrical engineering, signal processing, communications engineering, and computational intelligence. It is a valuable resource for students and researchers interested in nonlinear dynamics and synchronization with applications in selected areas.