Grammatical Inference [electronic resource] : 4th International Colloquium, ICGI-98 Ames, Iowa, USA, July 12–14, 1998 Proceedings / edited by Vasant Honavar, Giora Slutzki.

Results of the Abbadingo one DFA learning competition and a new evidence-driven state merging algorithm -- Learning k-variable pattern languages efficiently stochastically finite on average from positive data -- Meaning helps learning syntax -- A polynomial time incremental algorithm for learning DFA -- The data driven approach applied to the OSTIA algorithm -- Grammar model and grammar induction in the system NL PAGE -- Approximate learning of random subsequential transducers -- Learning stochastic finite automata from experts -- Learning a deterministic finite automaton with a recurrent neural network -- Applying grammatical inference in learning a language model for oral dialogue -- Real language learning -- A stochastic search approach to grammar induction -- Transducer-learning experiments on language understanding -- Locally threshold testable languages in strict sense: Application to the inference problem -- Learning a subclass of linear languages from positive structural information -- Grammatical inference in document recognition -- Stochastic inference of regular tree languages -- How considering incompatible state mergings may reduce the DFA induction search tree -- Learning regular grammars to model musical style: Comparing different coding schemes -- Learning a subclass of context-free languages -- Using symbol clustering to improve probabilistic automaton inference -- A performance evaluation of automatic survey classifiers -- Pattern discovery in biosequences.

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.