Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2014
Summary
Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books.
Godfrey H. HardyThere is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Ernest HemingwayA zillion grammatical inference years ago, some researchers in grammatical inference thought of writing a book about their favourite topic. If there was no agreement about the notations, the important algorithms, the central theorems or the fact that the chapter about learning from text had to come before or after the one dealing with learning from an informant, there were no protests when the intended title was proposed: the art of inferring grammars. The choice of the word art is meaningful: like in other areas of machine learning, what counted were the ideas, the fact that one was able to do something complicated like actually building an automaton from strings, and that it somehow fitted the intuition that biology and images (some typical examples) could be explained through language. This ‘artistic’ book was never written, and since then the field has matured.
When writing this book, I hoped to contribute to the idea that the field of grammatical inference has now established itself as a scientific area of research. But I also felt I would be happy if the reader could grasp those appealing artistic aspects of the field.
The artistic essence of grammatical inference was not the only problem needing to be tackled; other questions also required answers…
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- Information
- Grammatical InferenceLearning Automata and Grammars, pp. ix - xiiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010