This computer science book represents scattered information by formal languages and gives an in-depth discussion of scattered context grammars as formal means that process these languages. It is primarily meant as a monograph on these grammars, which represent an important trend of today’s formal language theory.

The text maintains a balance between fundamental concepts, theoretical results, and applications of these grammars. From a theoretical viewpoint, it introduces several variants of scattered context grammatical models. Based on these models, it demonstrates the concepts, methods, and techniques employed in handling scattered pieces of information with enough rigor to make them quite clear. It also explains a close relationship between the subject of the book and several important mathematical fi elds, such as algebra and graph theory.

From a more practical point of view, the book describes scattered information processing by fundamental information technologies. Throughout the book, several in-depth case studies and examples are carefully presented. Whilst discussing various methods concerning grammatical processing of scattered information, the text illustrates their applications with a focus on applications in linguistics.

The book is relevant to specialists and advanced students in theoretical computer science, mathematics, and linguistics.

Click here to view A. Meduna's website

The monograph discusses basic properties such as normal forms, closure properties, and generative power of scattered grammars and the language classes generated by them, as well as advanced topics like complexity and succinctness, and parsing theory.

Zentralblatt MATH, May 2011.