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ICGI-2002

the 6th International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference

ICGI-2002 is the sixth in a series of successful biennial international conferences on the area of grammatical inference.

Grammatical inference has been extensively addressed by researchers in information theory, automata theory, language acquisition, computational linguistics, machine learning, pattern recognition, computational learning theory and neural networks.

This colloquium aims at bringing together researchers in these fields. Previous editions of this meeting were held in Essex, U.K.; Alicante, Spain; Montpellier, France; and Ames, Iowa, USA and Lisbon, Portugal.

ICGI-2002 will be held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on September 23-25, 2002

Areas of Interest

The conference seeks to provide a forum for presentation and discussion of original research papers on all aspects of grammatical inference including, but not limited to:

• Different models of grammar induction: e.g., learning from examples, learning using examples and queries, incremental versus non-incremental learning, distribution-free models of learning, learning under various distributional assumptions (e.g., simple distributions), impossibility results, complexity results, characterizations of representational and search biases of grammar induction algorithms.

• Algorithms for induction of different classes of languages and automata: e.g., regular, context-free, and context-sensitive languages, interesting subsets of the above under additional syntactic constraints, tree and graph grammars, picture grammars, multi-dimensional grammars, attributed grammars, parameterized models, etc.

• Theoretical and experimental analysis of different approaches to grammar induction including artificial neural networks, statistical methods, symbolic methods, information-theoretic approaches, minimum description length, and complexity-theoretic approaches, heuristic methods, etc.

• Broader perspectives on grammar induction -- e.g., acquisition of grammar in conjunction with language semantics, semantic constraints on grammars, language acquisition by situated agents and robots, acquisition of language constructs that describe objects and events in space and time, developmental and evolutionary constraints on language acquisition, statistical modeling of natural language, etc.

• Demonstrated or potential applications of grammar induction in natural language acquisition, computational biology, structural pattern recognition, information retrieval, text processing, adaptive intelligent agents, systems modeling and control, and other domains.

Conference Format

The conference will include oral and possibly poster presentations of accepted papers, a small number of tutorials and invited talks. All accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings. The proceedings of ICGI-2002 are published by Springer-Verlag as volume LNAI 2484 in their Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series, a subseries of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.