Learning of Context-Free Languages: A Survey of the Literature

Abstract

We survey methods for learning context-free languages (CFL's) in the theoretical computer science literature. We first present some important negative results. Then, we consider five types of methods: those that take text as input, those that take structural information as input, those that rely on CFL formalisms that are not based on context-free grammars, those which learn subclasses of CFL's, and stochastic methods. A description of the subclasses of CFL's considered is provided, as is an extensive bibliography.