Grammatical Inference as Unification

We propose to set the grammatical inference problem in a logical framework. The search for admissible solutions in a given class of languages is reduced to the problem of unifying a set of terms. This point of view has been already developed in the particular context of categorial grammars, a type of lexicalized grammar. We present the state of the art in this domain and propose several improvements. The case of regular grammars is studied in a second part. We show that rational unification allows to infer such grammars. We give corresponding Prolog programs in both cases. Indeed, one of the aim of this work is to show that "lean" programs are possible for grammatical inference. This approach has been successful in the field of automated theorem proving and we expect to observe the same benefits in grammatical inference : efficiency and extendibility.

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