An Introduction to Grammatical Inference for Linguists

Abstract

This paper is meant to be an introductory guide to Grammatical Inference (GI), i.e., the study of machine learning of formal languages. It is designed for non-specialists in Computer Science, but with a special interest in language learning. It covers basic concepts and models developed in the framework of GI, and tries to point out the relevance of these studies for natural language acquisition.