Breeding Grammars: Grammatical Inference with a Genetic Algorithm

This paper presents a genetic algorithm used to infer context-free grammars from legal and illegal examples of a language. It discusses the representation of grammar rules in the form of bitstringsby way of an interval coding scheme, genetic operators for reproduction of grammars, and the method of evaluating the fitness of grammars with respect to the training examples. Results are reported on the inference of several of these grammars. Grammars for the language of correctly balanced and nested brackets, the language of sentences containing an equal number of a’s and b’s, a set of regular languages, and a micro-NL language were inferred. Furthermore, some possible improvements and extensions of the algorithm are discussed.

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