Grammatical inference: algorithms and applications

The Sixth International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference (ICGI2002) was held in Amsterdam on September 23-25th, 2002. ICGI2002 was the sixth in a series of successful biennial international conferenceson the area of grammatical inference. Previous meetings were held in Essex, U. K.; Alicante, Spain; Mo- pellier, France; Ames, Iowa, USA; Lisbon, Portugal. This series of meetings seeks to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of original research on all aspects of grammatical inference. Gr- matical inference, the process of inferring grammars from given data, is a ? eld that not only is challenging from a purely scienti? c standpoint but also ? nds many applications in real-world problems. Despite the fact that grammatical inference addresses problems in a re- tively narrow area, it uses techniques from many domains, and is positioned at the intersection of a number of di? erent disciplines. Researchers in grammatical inference come from ? elds as diverse as machine learning, theoretical computer science, computational linguistics, pattern recognition, and arti? cial neural n- works. From a practical standpoint, applications in areas like natural language - quisition, computational biology, structural pattern recognition, information - trieval, text processing, data compression and adaptive intelligent agents have either been demonstrated or proposed in the literature. The technical program included the presentation of 23 accepted papers (out of 41 submitted). Moreover, for the ? rst time a software presentation was or- nized at ICGI. Short descriptions of the corresponding software are included in these proceedings, too.