The Boisdale algorithm - an induction method for a subclass of unification grammar from positive data

Abstract. This paper introduces a new grammatical inference algorithm called the Boisdale algorithm. This algorithm can identify a class of contextfree unification grammar in the limit from positive data only. The Boisdale algorithm infers both the syntax and the semantics of the language, where the semantics of the language can be described using arbitrarily complex data structures represented as key value pairs. The Boisdale algorithm is an alignment based learning algorithm that executes in polynomial time with respect to the length of the training data and can infer a grammar when presented with any set of sentences tagged with any data structure. This paper includes a description of the algorithm, a description of a class of language that it can identify in the limit and some experimental results. 1