and
In cooperation with
American Association for Artificial Intelligence
IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society
ACL Special Interest Group on Natural Language Learning
Grammatical Inference, variously refered to as automata induction, grammar induction, and automatic language acquisition, refers to the process of learning of grammars and languages from data. Machine learning of grammars finds a variety of applications in syntactic pattern recognition, adaptive intelligent agents, diagnosis, computational biology, systems modelling, prediction, natural language acquisition, data mining and knowledge discovery.
Traditionally, grammatical inference has been studied by researchers in several research communities including: Information Theory, Formal Languages, Automata Theory, Language Acquisition, Computational Linguistics, Machine Learning, Pattern Recognition, Computational Learning Theory, Neural Networks, etc.
Perhaps one of the first attempts to bring together researchers working on grammatical inference for an interdisciplinary exchange of research results took place under the aegis of the First Colloquium on Grammatical Inference held at the University of Essex in United Kingdom in April 1993. This was followed by the (second) International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference, held at Alicante in Spain, the proceedings of which were published by Springer-Verlag as volume 862 of the Lectures Notes in Artificial Intelligence, and the Third International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference, held at Montpellier in France, the proceedings of which were published by Springer-Verlag as volume 1147 of the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence. Following the success of these events and the Workshop on Automata Induction, Grammatical Inference, and Language Acquisition, held in conjunction with the International Conference on Machine Learning at Nashville in United States in July 1997, the Fourth International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference will be held from July 12 through July 14, 1998, at Iowa State University in United States.
The conference seeks to provide a forum for presentation and discussion of original research papers on all aspects of grammatical inference including, but not limited to:
Technical Program Chairs:
Vasant Honavar and Giora Slutzki, Iowa State University, USA.
Technical Program Committee:
R. Berwick, MIT, USA
A. Brazma, European Bioinformatics Institute, Cambridge, UK.
M. Brent,
Johns Hopkins University, USA
C. Cardie, Cornell University, USA
W. Daelemans, Tilburg University, Netherlands
D. Dowe, Monash University, Australia
P. Dupont, University Jean Monnet at St. Etienne, France.
D. Estival, University of Melbourne, Australia
J. Feldman, International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, USA
L. Giles, NEC Research Institute, Princeton, USA
J. Gregor, University of Tennessee, USA
C. de la Higuera, University Jean Monnet at St. Etienne, France
A. Itai, Technion, Israel
T. Knuutila, University of Turku, Finland
J. Koza, Stanford University, USA
K. Lang, NEC Research Institute, Princeton, USA.
M. Li, University of Waterloo, Canada
E. Makinen, University of Tampere, Finland
L. Miclet, ENSSAT, Lannion, France.
G. Nagaraja, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India
H. Ney, University of Technology, Aachen, Germany
J. Nicolas, IRISA, France
R. Parekh, Allstate Research and Planning Center, Menlo Park, USA
L. Pitt, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
D. Powers, Flinders University, Australia
L. Reeker, National Science Foundation, USA
Y. Sakakibara, Tokyo Denki University, Japan.
C. Samuelsson, Lucent Technologies, USA
A. Sharma, University of New South Wales, Australia.
E. Vidal, U. Politecnica de Valencia, Spain
Dale Grosvenor, Iowa State University, USA.
K. Balakrishnan, Iowa State University, USA.
R. Bhatt, Iowa State University, USA
J. Yang, Iowa State University, USA.
The conference will include oral and possibly poster presentations of accepted papers, a small number of tutorials and invited talks. All accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings to be published by a major publisher. (Negotiations are underway with Springer-Verlag regarding the publication of ICGI-98 proceedings as a volume in their Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence which is part of the Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science Series).
versions of the papers, no more than 12 pages long, (including figures, tables, and references), should be submitted electronically to icgi98-submissions@cs.iastate.edu. Accepted papers will be allocated 12 pages in the proceedings (long papers) or 6 pages in the proceedings (short papers). Tentative formatting guidelines for the preparation of camera-ready versions provided by Springer-Verlag can be found here.
In those rare instances where authors might be unable to submit postscript versions of their papers electronically, we will try to accomodate them.
Each paper will be rigorously refereed by at least 2 reviewers for technical soundness, originality, and clarity of presentation.
Deadlines
The relevant schedule for paper submissions is as follows:
The relevant schedule for tutorials is as follows:
Limited financial support might be available, subject to the availability of funds, for: