Formal language

About: Formal language is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5763 publications have been published within this topic receiving 154114 citations.

Meaning, Creativity, and the Partial Inscrutability of the Human Mind

Abstract: Introduction: where has the philosophy of language gone wrong? Part I. Why Natural Languages are Not and Should Not be Represented as Formal Language: 1. Natural languages cannot be formal languages: the Lexicon 2. Natural languages cannot be formal languages: the logical structure Part II. The Lexicon, Explanations, and Productivity: 3. Lexical meanings as explanatory schemes 4. Key issues in theories of languages Part III. Explanation, the Productive Lexicon, and Limitations on Understanding Understandings: 5. Homo Sapiens - Homo Explanans 6. Is the human mind partially inscrutable?

Towards a theory of consistency enforcement

Abstract: State oriented specifications with invariants occur in almost all formal specification languages. Hence the problem is to prove the consistency of the specified operations with respect to the invariants. Whilst the problem seems to be easily solvable in predicative specifications, it usually requires sophisticated verification efforts, when specifications in the style of Dijkstra's guarded commands as e.g. in the specification language B are used. As an alternative consistency enforcement will be discussed in this paper. The basic idea is to replace inconsistent operations by new consistent ones preserving at the same time the intention of the old one. More precisely, this can be formalized by consistent spezializations, where specialization is a specific partial order on operations defined via predicate transformers. It will be shown that greatest consistent specializations (GCSs) always exist and are compatible with conjunctions of invariants. Then under certain mild restrictions the general construction of such GCSs is possible. Precisely, given the GCSs of simple basic assignments the GCS of a complex operation results from replacing involved assignments by their GCSs and the investigation of a guard. In general, GCS construction can be embedded in refinement calculi and therefore strengthens the systematic development of correct programs.

Mathematical foundations of computer science 2011 : 36th International Symposium, MFCS 2011, Warsaw, Poland, August 22-26, 2011: proceedings

Abstract: This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 36th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science, MFCS 2011, held in Warsaw, Poland, in August 2011. The 48 revised full papers presented together with 6 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 129 submissions. Topics covered include algorithmic game theory, algorithmic learning theory, algorithms and data structures, automata, grammars and formal languages, bioinformatics, complexity, computational geometry, computer-assisted reasoning, concurrency theory, cryptography and security, databases and knowledge-based systems, formal specifications and program development, foundations of computing, logic in computer science, mobile computing, models of computation, networks, parallel and distributed computing, quantum computing, semantics and verification of programs, and theoretical issues in artificial intelligence.

The calculus of facts

Abstract: Nets of conditions and events (‘special’ Petri nets) are widely used models of dynamic systems. They represent the causal structure of the concurrent operation and co-operation of the components of a system. In this paper we introduce a net theoretic version of the first-order predicate calculus. Its purpose is to offer a formal language for expressing the relationship between a net model and the modelled system, and to provide rules for deriving the logical consequences of such an interpretation in a way that the results are expressed in the same language as the model, namely the net language. By this we permit the use of symbolic logic as part of a general formalism for the analysis and specification of dynamic systems. We show how ‘static’ logic can be correctly applied even in those practically important dynamic contexts where certain sentences change their truthvalues in a not fully specified order. As a useful by-product the graphical representation of nets induces a very natural graphical representation of the predicate calculus.

The Netvertising Image: Netvertising Image Communication Model (NICM) and Construct Definition

Abstract: This paper presents a communication model and nominal definition of advertising images on the Internet, here called the netvertising image (Stern 2001). The model and attribute-based definition facilitate the construction of a formal language system for theory development and hypothesis testing specific to images in the multimedia context. The necessity for so doing is that netvertising has inherited a legacy of fuzzy meanings from marketing, advertising, and consumer behavior research, in which “image” is used variously across the domains of media, message, mental responses, and marketplace behavior. Transformation from this ordinary but ambiguous language system to a formal scientific one proceeds through building a model, sourcing the roots of ordinary meanings, recasting them as attributes, and setting forth a nominal definition. The paper ends with suggestions for future research.