This volume contains papers presented at the first
international workshop onword equations and related topics
held at the University of T}bingen in October 1990. Word
equations, the central topic of this annual workshop, lieat
the intersection of several important areas of computer
science, suchas unification theory, combinatorics on words,
list processing, and constraint logic programming. The
workshop is a forum where researchers fromthese different
domains may present and discuss results and ideas, thereby
supporting interaction and cross-fertilization between
theoretical questions and practical applications. The volume
collects papers which:
- contain new and relevant results,
- describe a new approach to a subject, or
- give a survey of main developments in an area.
Papers cover investigations on free groups, associative
unification and Makanin's algorithm to decide the
solvability of equations in free semigroups, general
unification theory and its relationship to algebra and model
theory, Thue systems, and finitely presented groups.