The problem of inducing, learning or inferring grammars has been studied for decades, but only in recent years has grammatical inference emerged as an independent field with connections to many scientific disciplines, including bio-informatics, computational linguistics and pattern recognition. This book meets the need for a comprehensive and unified summary of the basic techniques and results, suitable for researchers working in these various areas. In Part I, the objects of use for grammatical inference are studied in detail: strings and their topology, automata and grammars, whether probabilistic or not. Part II carefully explores the main questions in the field: What does learning mean? How can we associate complexity theory with learning? In Part III the author describes a number of techniques and algorithms that allow us to learn from text, from an informant, or through interaction with the environment. These concern automata, grammars, rewriting systems, pattern languages or transducers.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference, ICGI 2000, held in Lisbon, Portugal in September 2000. The 24 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 35 submissions. The papers address topics like machine learning, automata, theoretical computer science, computational linguistics, pattern recognition, artificial neural networks, natural language acquisition, computational biology, information retrieval, text processing, and adaptive intelligent agents.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Fourth International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference, ICGI-98, held in Ames, Iowa, in July 1998. The 23 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book from a total of 35 submissions. The book addresses a wide range of grammatical inference theory such as automata induction, grammar induction, automatic language acquisition, etc. as well as a variety of applications in areas like syntactic pattern recognition, adaptive intelligent agents, diagnosis, computational biology, data mining, and knowledge discovery.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference, ICGI 2004, held in Athens, Greece in October 2004. The 20 revised full papers and 8 revised poster papers presented together with 3 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 45 submissions. The topics of the papers presented range from theoretical results of learning algorithms to innovative applications of grammatical inference and from learning several interesting classes of formal grammars to estimations of probabilistic grammars.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference, ICGI-96, held in Montpellier, France, in September 1996. The 25 revised full papers contained in the book together with two invited key papers by Magerman and Knuutila were carefully selected for presentation at the conference. The papers are organized in sections on algebraic methods and algorithms, natural language and pattern recognition, inference and stochastic models, incremental methods and inductive logic programming, and operational issues.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference, ICGI 2006. The book presents 25 revised full papers and 8 revised short papers together with 2 invited contributions, carefully reviewed and selected. The topics discussed range from theoretical results of learning algorithms to innovative applications of grammatical inference and from learning several interesting classes of formal grammars to applications to natural language processing.

This book is currently the only one on this subject containing both introductory material and advanced recent research results. It presents, at one end, fundamental concepts and notations developed in syntactic and structural pattern recognition and at the other, reports on the current state of the art with respect to both methodology and applications. In particular, it includes artificial intelligence related techniques, which are likely to become very important in future pattern recognition.The book consists of individual chapters written by different authors. The chapters are grouped into broader subject areas like “Syntactic Representation and Parsing”, “Structural Representation and Matching”, “Learning”, etc. Each chapter is a self-contained presentation of one particular topic. In order to keep the original flavor of each contribution, no efforts were undertaken to unify the different chapters with respect to notation. Naturally, the self-containedness of the individual chapters results in some redundancy. However, we believe that this handicap is compensated by the fact that each contribution can be read individually without prior study of the preceding chapters. A unification of the spectrum of material covered by the individual chapters is provided by the subject and author index included at the end of the book.