Language as a Complex System: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Gemma Bel-Enguix · M. Dolores Jiménez-López

dhj 2009 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

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Language is one of the most challenging issues that remain to be explained from the physiological and psychological points of view. As a complex system, its formal modelling and simulation present important difficulties. Models proposed up to now have not been able to give either a coherent explanation of natural language or a satisfactory computational model for the processing of natural language. To investigate natural language, we need to cross traditional academic boundaries in order to solve the different problems related to language.

This book is an attempt to connect and integrate several academic disciplines and technologies in the pursuit of a common task: the study of language. The main goal of the book is to boost the interchange of knowledge and viewpoints between specialists who, working on linguistics, biology or computation, have an interest in bringing their methods together in order to provide innovative and challenging tools and formalisms to approach and improve theories and models on languages.

The subject of this book will attract researchers from many fields who are interested in natural or artificial languages and want to enrich their scientific research with theories, methods and ideas coming from different disciplines. People dealing with linguistics, computer science, formal language theory and biology may find in this book new and challenging ideas.

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Gemma Bel-Enguix holds a Ramon y Cajal research position at the Department of Romance Philologies in the Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona. She has been a pre-doctoral fellow at Leiden University and at UNAM University. As a postdoctoral fellow she worked at the universities of Georgetown and Milano-Bicocca. Her main research topic is the application of natural computing models in linguistic studies.

M. Dolores Jiménez López is a lecturer at the Department of Romance Philologies in the Rovira i Virgili University (Tarragona, Spain). She worked for two years, as a pre-doctoral fellow, at the Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. Her post-doctoral training includes a three-year stay at the Department of Computer Science in the University of Pisa. Application of formal models to natural language analysis is one of her main research topics.