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Three Learnable Models for the Description of Language

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Language and Automata Theory and Applications (LATA 2010)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 6031))

Abstract

Learnability is a vital property of formal grammars: representation classes should be defined in such a way that they are learnable. One way to build learnable representations is by making them objective or empiricist: the structure of the representation should be based on the structure of the language. Rather than defining a function from representation to language we should start by defining a function from the language to the representation: following this strategy gives classes of representations that are easy to learn. We illustrate this approach with three classes, defined in analogy to the lowest three levels of the Chomsky hierarchy. First, we recall the canonical deterministic finite automaton, where the states of the automaton correspond to the right congruence classes of the language. Secondly, we define context free grammars where the non-terminals of the grammar correspond to the syntactic congruence classes, and where the productions are defined by the syntactic monoid; finally we define a residuated lattice structure from the Galois connection between strings and contexts, which we call the syntactic concept lattice, and base a representation on this, which allows us to define a class of languages that includes some non-context free languages, many context-free languages and all regular languages. All three classes are efficiently learnable under suitable learning paradigms.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, TW20 0EX

    Alexander Clark

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  1. Alexander Clark
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Avinguda Catalunya, 35, 43002, Tarragona, Spain

    Adrian-Horia Dediu  & Carlos Martín-Vide  & 

  2. Fachbereich IV - Informatik, Universität Trier, Campus II, Behringstraße, 54286, Trier, Germany

    Henning Fernau

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Clark, A. (2010). Three Learnable Models for the Description of Language. In: Dediu, AH., Fernau, H., Martín-Vide, C. (eds) Language and Automata Theory and Applications. LATA 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6031. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13089-2_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13089-2_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-13088-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-13089-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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