A proposal for contextual grammatical inference

Abstract

Grammatical Inference deals with the learning of formal languages from data. Research in this field has mainly reduced the problem of language learning to syntax learning. Taking into account that the theoretical results obtained in Grammatical Inference show that learning formal languages only from syntax is generally hard, in this paper we propose to also take into account contextual information during the language learning process. First, we review works in the area of Artificial Intelligence that use the concept of context, and then, we present the theoretical, algorithmic and practical aspects of our proposal.