The Linguistic Relevance of Lindenmayer Systems
Leonor Becerra, Suna Bensch and María Dolores Jiménez-López
ICAART 2010 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence Volume 2, pp. 395-402, 2010.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the linguistic relevance of Lindenmayer Systems (L Systems). L systems were introduced in the late sixties by Aristid Lindemayer as a mathematical theory of biological development. Thus they can be considered as one of the first bio-inspired models in the theory of formal languages. Two main properties in L systems are 1) the idea of parallelism in the rewriting process and 2) their expressiveness to describe non-context free structures that can be found in natural languages. Therefore, the linguistic relevance of this formalism is clearly based on three main features: bio-inspiration, parallelism and generation of non-context free languages. Despite these interesting properties, L systems have not been investigated from a linguistic point of view. With this paper we point out the interest of applying these bio-inspired systems to the description and processing of natural language.

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