Grammatical Inference: Algorithms and Applications

The Fifth International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference (ICGI-2000) was heldinLisbononSeptember11-13th,2000.ICGI-2000wasthe?fthinaseriesof successfulbiennialinternationalconferencesintheareaofgrammaticalinference. Previous conferences were held in Essex, U.K.; Alicante, Spain; Montpellier, France; and Ames, Iowa, USA. This series of meetings seeks to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of original research on all aspects of grammatical inference. Gram- tical inference, the process of inferring grammar from given data, is a ?eld that is not only challenging from a purely scienti?c standpoint but also ?nds many applications in real world problems. Despitethefactthatgrammaticalinferenceaddressesproblemsinarelatively narrow area, it uses techniques from many domains, and intersects a number of di?erent disciplines. Researchers in grammatical inference come from elds as diverse as machine learning, theoretical computer science, computational ling- stics, pattern recognition and arti?cial neural networks. From a practical standpoint, applications in areas such as natural language acquisition, computational biology, structural pattern recognition, information retrieval, text processing and adaptive intelligent agents have either been - monstrated or proposed in the literature. ICGI-2000 was held jointly with CoNLL-2000, the Computational Natural Language Learning Workshop and LLL-2000, the Second Learning Language in LogicWorkshop.Thetechnicalprogramincludedthepresentationof24accepted papers (out of 35 submitted) as well as joint sessions with CoNLL and LLL. A tutorial program organized by Gabriel Pereira Lopes took place after the meetings and included tutorials by Raymond Mooney, Gregory Grefenstette, Walter Daelemans, Ant´ onio Ribeiro, Joaquim Ferreira da Silva, Gael Dias, Nuno Marques, VitorRossio, Jo~ aoBalsaandAlexandreAgostini.Thejointrealization of these events represents a unique opportunity for researchers in these related ?elds to interact and exchange ideas.