Natural and Formal Languages
Languages, formal or natural, permeate our intellectual and practical lives. When agents, computer or human, wish to record something, they must encode it in some type of language. Languages are defined by syntactic rules or constraints and are typically associated with some type of semantics or meaning.
The research group Natural and Formal Languages (NFL) studies the theoretical and practical aspects of representing languages on computers. The work of the group spans from highly theoretical analysis of formal languages as a theoretical basis for XML and linguistic applications to practical implementation and evaluation of natural language interfaces.
Group Members
- Dr. Suna Bensch
- Martin Berglund
- Dr. Henrik Björklund
- Prof. Frank Drewes (Director)
- Petter Ericsson
- Johan Granberg
- Dr. Steve Hegner
- Dr. Johanna Högberg
- Dr. Michael Minock
Research Areas
- Automata theory and formal languages
* Automata on trees and similar structures
* Bisimulation
* Gammatical Inference
* Relation between logics and automata
* Tree automata as a theoretical foundation for XML - Mathematical and computational linguistics
* Mildly context-senstive grammar formalisms
* Analysis of corpora - Natural language interfaces
* Learning semantic grammars
* Natural language generation
Some talks held by group members
- F. Drewes: The group Natural and Formal Languages – Projects and Research Directions, Research Day 7 Dec. 2012, Department of Computing Science, Umeå University.
- F. Drewes: Some Observations About Reader Languages, FASTAR/Espresso Workshop 29 Oct. 2012, Stellenbosch (South Africa).
