We describe a corpus-based induction algorithm for probabilistic context-free
grammars. The algorithm employs a greedy heuristic search within a Bayesian
framework, and a post-pass using the Inside-Outside algorithm. We compare the
performance of our algorithm to n-gram models and the Inside-Outside algorithm
in three language modeling tasks. In two of the tasks, the training data is
generated by a probabilistic context-free grammar and in both tasks our
algorithm outperforms the other techniques. The third task involves
naturally-occurring data, and in this task our algorithm does not perform as
well as n-gram models but vastly outperforms the Inside-Outside algorithm.Comment: 8 pages, LaTeX, uses aclap.st