Evolving stochastic context-free grammars from examples using a minimum description length principle

This paper describes an evolutionary approach to the problem of inferring stochastic context-free grammars from finite language samples. The approach employs a genetic algorithm, with a fitness function derived from a minimum description length principle. Solutions to the inference problem are evolved by optimizing the parameters of a covering grammar for a given language sample. We provide details of our fitness function for grammars and present the results of a number of experiments in learning grammars for a range of formal languages. Keywords: grammatical inference, genetic algorithms, language modelling, formal languages, induction, minimum description length. Introduction Grammatical inference (Gold 1978) is a fundamental problem in many areas of artificial intelligence and cognitive science, including speech and language processing, syntactic pattern recognition and automated programming. Although a wide variety of techniques for automated grammatical inference have been devis..