9th International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference

ICGI-2008 is the ninth in a series of successful biennial international conferences in 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.

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, learnability 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 subclasses of the above under additional syntactic constraints, tree and graph grammars, picture grammars, multidimensional 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, 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 modelling of natural language, etc.

Historically the roots of grammatical inference have been in the modelling of first language acquisition by human infants: we especially invite submissions that address this theme, directly or indirectly.

The conference will include plenary and invited talks, software demonstrations and possibly poster presentations of accepted papers and tutorials. All plenary and invited papers will appear in the conference proceedings.

The proceedings of ICGI-2008 will be published by Springer-Verlag as a volume in their Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, a subseries of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

Programme Committie

• Pieter Adriaans, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Dana Angluin, Yale University, USA
• Jose Balcazar, Universitat Politechnica de Catalunya, Spain
• Rens Bod, University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK
• Rafael Carrasco, University of Alicante, Spain
• Christophe Costa Florencio, University of Louvain, Belgium
• Francois Denis, University of Provence, Marseille, France.
• Pierre Dupont, University of Louvain, Belgium
• Remi Eyraud, University of Provence, Marseille, France.
• Henning Fernau, University of Trier, Germany
• Remi Gilleron, University of Lille, France
• Colin de la Higuera, EURISE, Univ. de St. Etienne, France
• Vasant Honavar, Iowa State University, USA
• Makoto Kanazawa, National Institute of Informatics, Japan
• Satoshi Kobayashi, The University of Electro-Communications, Chofu, Japan
• Aryeh Kontorovich, Weizmann Institute, Israel
• Tim Oates, University of Maryland Baltimore County, USA
• Arlindo Oliveira, Lisbon Technical University, Portugal
• Jose Oncina Carratala, Universidade de Alicante, Spain
• Georgios Paliouras, Inst. of Informatics and Telecommunications, NCSR, Greece
• Rajesh Parekh, Yahoo!, USA
• Yasubumi Sakakibara, Keio University, Japan
• Isabelle Tellier, University of Lille, France
• Franck Thollard, University of St. Etienne, France
• Etsuji Tomita, The University of Electro-Communications, Chofu, Japan
• Enrique Vidal, Universidade Politecnica de Valencia, Spain
• Chris Watkins, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK Ryo Yoshinaka,
• Hokkaido University, Japan
• Menno van Zaanen, Macquarie University, Australia