Language Hierarchy
Possibly the most applied result in combinatorics on words is the Chomsky hierarchy, developed by Noam Chomsky. He studied formal language in the 1950s. His way of looking at language simplified the subject. He disregards the actual meaning of the word, does not consider certain factors such as frequency and context, and applies patterns of short terms to all length terms. The basic idea of Chomsky's work is to divide language into four levels, or the language hierarchy. The four levels are: regular, context-free, context-sensitive, and computably enumerable or unrestricted. Regular is the least complex while computably enumerable is the most complex. While his work grew out of combinatorics on words, it drastically affected other disciplines, especially computer science.
Read more about this topic: Combinatorics On Words
Famous quotes containing the words language and/or hierarchy:
“Strange goings on! Jones did it slowly, deliberately, in the bathroom, with a knife, at midnight. What he did was butter a piece of toast. We are too familiar with the language of action to notice at first an anomaly: the ‘it’ of ‘Jones did it slowly, deliberately,...’ seems to refer to some entity, presumably an action, that is then characterized in a number of ways.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)
“In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”
—Laurence J. Peter (1919–1990)