This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Language and Automata Theory and Applications, LATA 2008, held in Tarragona, Spain, in March 2008.

Invited Papers.- Tree-Walking Automata.- Formal Language Tools for Template-Guided DNA Recombination.- Subsequence Counting, Matrix Representations and a Theorem of Eilenberg.- Synchronizing Automata and the ?erný Conjecture.- Contributed Papers.- About Universal Hybrid Networks of Evolutionary Processors of Small Size.- On Bifix Systems and Generalizations.- Finite Automata, Palindromes, Powers, and Patterns.- One-Dimensional Quantum Cellular Automata over Finite, Unbounded Configurations.- The Three-Color and Two-Color TantrixTM Rotation Puzzle Problems Are NP-Complete Via Parsimonious Reductions.- Optional and Iterated Types for Pregroup Grammars.- Transformations and Preservation of Self-assembly Dynamics through Homotheties.- Deterministic Input-Reversal and Input-Revolving Finite Automata.- Random Context in Regulated Rewriting Versus Cooperating Distributed Grammar Systems.- Extending the Overlap Graph for Gene Assembly in Ciliates.- Automatic Presentations for Cancellative Semigroups.- Induced Subshifts and Cellular Automata.- Hopcroft's Algorithm and Cyclic Automata.- Efficient Inclusion Checking for Deterministic Tree Automata and DTDs.- Consensual Definition of Languages by Regular Sets.- k-Petri Net Controlled Grammars.- 2-Synchronizing Words.- Not So Many Runs in Strings.- A Hybrid Approach to Word Segmentation of Vietnamese Texts.- On Linear Logic Planning and Concurrency.- On the Relation between Multicomponent Tree Adjoining Grammars with Tree Tuples (TT-MCTAG) and Range Concatenation Grammars (RCG).- Anti-pattern Matching Modulo.- Counting Ordered Patterns in Words Generated by Morphisms.- Literal Varieties of Languages Induced by Homomorphisms onto Nilpotent Groups.- Characterization of Star-Connected Languages Using Finite Automata.- Match-Boundswith Dependency Pairs for Proving Termination of Rewrite Systems.- Further Results on Insertion-Deletion Systems with One-Sided Contexts.- On Regularity-Preservation by String-Rewriting Systems.- Minimizing Deterministic Weighted Tree Automata.- Lower Bounds for Generalized Quantum Finite Automata.- How Many Figure Sets Are Codes?.- On Alternating Phrase-Structure Grammars.- A Two-Dimensional Taxonomy of Proper Languages of Lexicalized FRR-Automata.- Minimalist Grammars with Unbounded Scrambling and Nondiscriminating Barriers Are NP-Hard.- Sorting and Element Distinctness on One-Way Turing Machines.- On Periodicity of Generalized Two-Dimensional Words.- On the Analysis of "Simple" 2D Stochastic Cellular Automata.- Polycyclic and Bicyclic Valence Automata.- Length Codes, Products of Languages and Primality.- An Efficient Algorithm for the Inclusion Problem of a Subclass of DPDAs.