  We introduce the notion of multipass automata as a generalization of pushdown
automata and study the classes of languages accepted by such machines. The
class of languages accepted by deterministic multipass automata is exactly the
Boolean closure of the class of deterministic context-free languages while the
class of languages accepted by nondeterministic multipass automata is exactly
the class of poly-context-free languages, that is, languages which are the
intersection of finitely many context-free languages. We illustrate the use of
these automata by studying groups whose word problems are in the above classes.
