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The query complexity of learning some subclasses of context-free grammars

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 904))

Abstract

In the last COLT Conference A.Burago showed that the class of structurally reversible grammars is learnable in polynomial time using membership and equivalence queries. The paper shows that this class of grammars is not learnable using either membership alone or equivalence alone. However, it turns out that structurally reversible grammars are a superclass of very simple grammars which are learnable using only equivalence queries. Furthermore, we prove that the number of alternations between equivalence and membership queries cannot be constant. We also prove a lower bound in the number of alternations between membership and equivalence queries which is an improvement with respect to the same lower bound for deterministic finite automata. Finally, we disccus a possible trade-off between membership and equivalence queries in Burago's algorithm that might allow us to reduce the number of equivalence queries.

Research supported by the Esprit EC program under project 7141 (ALCOM-II) and Working Group 8556 (NeuroColt), and by the Spanish DGICYT (project PB92-0709).

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Paul Vitányi

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© 1995 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Domingo, C., Lavín, V. (1995). The query complexity of learning some subclasses of context-free grammars. In: Vitányi, P. (eds) Computational Learning Theory. EuroCOLT 1995. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 904. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-59119-2_195

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-59119-2_195

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-59119-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49195-8

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