Dr.

Chomsky,

I can fill in some of the details of what happened and provide some rationale that will bring everything up to
date. Needless to say, a lot has happened; and for us, it took all this time just to find the right formalism – 3
decades.

Kozen, himself, only found an algebraic axiom set for type 3 in the mid 1990's, overcoming the false road block
on the field stemming from Conway's "no go" result on axiomatization in the 1960's. In fact, the simplest axioms
* *
are (1) 0* = 1 and (2) the least solution to the inequality x≥a+bx+xc is x=b a c . Kozen proved in
1994 that it's complete; and he and I redid Parikh's Theorem in 1999 based on it; actually providing a simple
closed form solution for the inequalities comprising a context-free grammar.

Both this and the Parikh Theorem showed the need to foray into Universal Algebra and even Category Theory.
The conference we just submitted to was partly founded c. 2000 on that very premise and as a direct response to
our 1999 publication. Kozen is at it this year, and I think he gives his talk today.

The 1994 axioms are too weak to handle most results for context-free languages, because of the undecideability
theorems and so require a second order formalism, instead. That I provided in 2008, and Kozen's group did their
equivalent formulation in 2014. There's no avoiding the need to go beyond first order logic. So, in essence, this
is no longer just an algebra, but a form of analysis or calculus.

Hans Leiss, my partner, had been working on devising similar formalisms during this time; and he proved the
equivalence of the 2 formulations. The equivalence sets the stage. The coup de grace will be when I re-establish
the result as a simple corollary of the revised Chomsky-Schuetzenberger Theorem (or CST for short).

All of Knuth's LR parsing formalism (and its GLR generalization used for natural language processing) has a
dramatically simpler and more transparent treatment within the algebraic formlism provided ultimately by that
theorem.

As for the rationale:

To handle non-free concatenation (as appears with 2-dimensional or cursive scripts, or in phonology or in verbal
syntax, eg. "be/-ing" + "run" = "be running") requires generalizing word algebras to monoids, where non-trivial
relations are permitted.

So a grammar is treated as a system of inequalities over monoids over which the least fixed-point solution is
sought. (And the fact that this is actually a non-numeric form of "convex optimzation" didn't dawn on me until a
few months ago.) The terminals comprise the word algebra, the non-terminals are the variables/interdeterminates
– just like had originally been conceived in the early 1960's.

This requires the ability to add indeterminates to an algebra – free extensions. Free extensions are a general
concept in both Universal Algebra and category theory; in the latter case, it's done with the co-product.

Your version of the CST replaces words by brackets; in contrast, we put the brackets around the words and leave
the words intact. That reflects the informal use I've been making of the CST in my applications since the 1990's.
Hans surmised that the reason you and Schuetzeberger replaced the words with brackets is that you may have
been thinking of them as word classes; which would put them on equal par with phrase classes.

To erase brackets with algebra requires going like: <NP| the dog |NP> = the dog <NP| |NP> = the dog. 1 Adding
such non-trivial relations, like the cancellation property <NP| |NP> = 1, is done in Universal Algebra using
congruence relations. In category theory congruence relations are done with co-equalizers, which are almost
synonymous.
1In the 1990's I borrowed Dirac's Bra-Ket notation to use for the brackets.
Combining two or more tiers, as here with bracket-tier + word-tier, is done in both Universal Algebra and
category theory with the direct product. The same applies more generally: e.g. combining a phonological +
intonation + volume tier for voice; combining an input and output tier for transduction; combining multiple tiers
for multi-agent communications.

So a by-product of our more general treatment is that our "type 0/2/3" covers both languages and translations;
both automata and transducers; in a common framework; while, in contrast, the textbook treatment covers
automata and transducers as separate but parallel formalisms.

The commuting "<NP| the dog" = "the dog <NP|" of two subalgebras (here: the word-algebra and bracket-
algebra) – that's what tensor products in algebra do. The commutation rule, being also a non-trivial relation, is
done in category theory with the co-equalizer. Tensor products are therefore made from direct product + co-
equalizer.

The actual constructions in the paper are intended as nothing more than technical fine print to get the job done.
My partner Hans found the construction for co-equalizers that we used and initially came back to me with a "Ok.
I solved it. So what?" I came back to him with "Don't you realize the significance of what you just did?!",
pointed out all the above-mentioned ramifications and showed him how it can be used to construct tensor
products. That's when he moved to write up the first 2 publications and submit it to the conference that ends
tomorrow.

In the video I created with Lydia here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Qp7cjH4d9Y
the voice/singing synthesis is done straight from spectrographs (no voice synthesis software needed or used).
The intonation, volume and phonological tiers were created separately and then lined up. The phonemes and
morphemes are blended smoothly so it doesn't sound artificial. That's the "non-trivial" monoid algebra at play.
There's also aspiration. Robot voices never do that. Even at MIT, Google or Amazon, the engineers forget about
that. That's why their machines sound fake.

The first 50 seconds of the video has just an intonation and volume tier -- the singing. The phonological tiers all
kick in at around 1:00 – around 50 voices I think, I lost count. It sounds like an entire stadium. Their intonations
are different for each, but choreographed to produce the harmonies you hear. That's multi-agent
communications: the tensor product at play.

The choreography and rendering are, themselves, an application of pragmatics; which could be conceived of as a
kind of optimization problem (that of finding the most effective and/or poignant way to render intended meaning
or translation.) And I'm getting close to formalizing pragmatics along these lines.

When optimization is applied to this present situation, to produce a short-version reply to your remark, it would
result in the creation of a sentence like this:
"you're never too old to get back into the fold!"