Using symbolic techniques from Mathematica for studying formal languages and automata

Formal Languages constitute an important area in the field of computer science. In the recent years, efforts have been made to develop computerized tools that can help in doing various kinds of computational experiments with this subject. One such effort is made by Dr. Quoc-Nam Tran using symbolic techniques from computer algebra. The main goal is to build a system that can offer a computational and graphical environment for symbolic manipulations and visualization of various objects of formal languages. Following Dr. Tran's approach, in this thesis using the advanced features from computer algebra system Mathematica, a package is provided that can offer a unified approach for working with formal languages, grammars, automata and related matters. Efforts have also been made to analyze the theoretical complexity of foundational and advanced algorithms in formal languages, as well as implementing various parsing and recognition techniques for general context-free grammars.*.;*This dissertation is compound (contains both a paper copy and a CD as part of the dissertation).