Grammar induction

Grammar induction, also known as grammatical inference or syntactic pattern recognition, refers to the process in machine learning of learning a formal grammar (usually as a collection of re-write rules or productions or alternatively as a finite state machine or automaton of some kind) from a set of observations, thus constructing a model which accounts for the characteristics of the observed objects. More generally, grammatical inference is that branch of machine learning where the instance space consists of discrete combinatorial objects such as strings, trees and graphs.