Natural Language Grammatical Inference
Jason L. Hutchens, Mike Alder, Yianni Attikiouzel · 1994
This project is concerned with programming a computer to make predictions about which words are most likely to follow a small segment of English text. At first this may seem a strange problem, but I intend to show that there exist a wide range of applications that would benefit from such a program. Indeed, my motivation for approaching this problem was to provide a way of improving the accuracy of speech recognition systems. Additionally, I am interested with the problem of Grammatical Inference. In fact, the word prediction problem and the Grammatical Inference problem are intertwined, and it seems that approaching either one will lead to the other. Grammatical Inference entails inferring a grammar for an arbitrary language from a finite set of sample sentences in the language. It is quite easy to measure the performance of a word prediction system, providing that its prediction is given as a probability distribution. This allows us to compare our predictor with others, such as the tr...