eg-GRIDS: Context-free grammatical inference from positive examples using genetic search

Abstract

In this paper we present eg-GRIDS, an algorithm for inducing context-free grammars that is able to learn from positive sample sentences. The presented algorithm, similar to its GRIDS predecessors, uses simplicity as a criterion for directing inference, and a set of operators for exploring the search space. In addition to the basic beam search strategy of GRIDS, eg-GRIDS incorporates an evolutionary grammar selection process, aiming to explore a larger part of the search space. Evaluation results are presented on artificially generated data, comparing the performance of beam search and genetic search. These results show that genetic search performs better than beam search while being significantly more efficient computationally. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.