Colin de la Higuera: Grammatical inference: learning automata and grammars

摘要

Grammatical inference (GI) is concerned with the study of algorithms for learning automata and grammars from strings. Colin de la Higuera sees a subtle, informal, and almost philosophical, distinction between grammar induction (finding a grammar that explains as much as possible of the data) and grammatical inference (finding the true or only target grammar covering a set of strings). The latter puts more emphasis on the learning process. Although this field has existed for a long time, almost twenty years with its own conference (International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference, ICGI), this is the first monograph on the subject. It has the aim of bringing together the most salient concepts and results, until now dispersed over different publications, in a uniform notation and framework.