Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference (ICGI)

The Sixth International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference (ICGI2002) was held in Amsterdam on September 23-25th, 2002. ICGI2002 was the sixth in a series of successful biennial international conferences on the area of grammatical inference. Previous meetings were held in Essex, U.K.; Alicante, Spain; Montpelier, France; Ames, Iowa, USA; Lisbon, Portugal. This series of meetings seeks to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of original research on all aspects of grammatical inference. Grammatical inference, the process of inferring grammars from given data, is a field that not only is challenging from a purely scientific standpoint but also finds many applications in real-world problems. Despite the fact that grammatical inference addresses problems in a relatively narrow area, it uses techniques from many domains, and is positioned at the intersection of a number of different disciplines. Researchers in grammatical inference come from fields as diverse as machine learning, theoretical computer science, computational linguistics, pattern recognition, and artificial neural n- works. From a practical standpoint, applications in areas like natural language inquisition, computational biology, structural pattern recognition, information retrieval, text processing, data compression and adaptive intelligent agents have either been demonstrated or proposed in the literature. The technical program included the presentation of 23 accepted papers (out of 41 submitted). Moreover, for the first time a software presentation was organized at ICGI. Short descriptions of the corresponding software are included in these proceedings, too.