Jacques Sakarovitch – författare

Automata theory lies at the foundation of computer science, and is vital to a theoretical understanding of how computers work and what constitutes formal methods. This treatise gives a rigorous account of the topic and illuminates its real meaning by looking at the subject in a variety of ways. The first part of the book is organised around notions of rationality and recognisability. The second part deals with relations between words realised by finite automata, which not only exemplifies the automata theory but also illustrates the variety of its methods and its fields of application. Many exercises are included, ranging from those that test the reader, to those that are technical results, to those that extend ideas presented in the text. Solutions or answers to many of these are included in the book.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on the Finite-State-Methods and Natural Language Processing, FSMNLP 2009. The workshop was held at the University of Pretoria, South Africa on July 2009. In total 21 papers were submitted and of those papers 13 were accepted as regular papers and a further 6 as extended abstracts. The papers are devoted to computational morphology, natural language processing, finite-state methods, automata, and related formal language theory.