Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation


  Learning Context-Free Grammars by Minimizing Description Length

Sean Stromsten
Department of Psychology
Stanford University
Palo Alto, CA

http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~sean/

I will describe some joint work with Pat Langley on the task of inducing context-free grammars from positive example sentences. Our algorithm (like several others) alternately applies simple `merge' and `chunk' operators to produce new grammars from existing ones that generate an example set. We have verified the utility of a description-length score for guiding search through the space of grammars, given small example sets, and discuss prospects for scaling up.



Date: Thurs., May 17

Time: 4:15-5:30PM

Place: Cordura 100


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