Automatic learning of subclasses of pattern languages

Abstract

Automatic classes are classes of languages for which a finite automaton can decide membership question for the languages in the class, in a uniform way, given an index for the language. For alphabet size of at least 4, every automatic class of erasing pattern languages is contained, for some constant n, in the class of all languages generated by patterns which contain (1) every variable only once and (2) at most n symbols after the first occurrence of a variable. It is shown that such a class is automatically learnable using a learner with long-term memory bounded by the length of the first example seen. The study is extended to show the learnability of related classes such as the class of unions of two pattern languages of the above type. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.